#Mayo Monster??
4 messages in this thread
Well, El Cheapo may have done hisself in this time. I just grabbed a copy of
the Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, Interactive Edition CD-ROM that was on sale
for $18. Then I got it home and discovered that it doesn't print anything,
except its own help index (Wow, that impressed me!). Seems this is a bundle
disk that was being sold separately, which I suppose is an attempted felonious
no-no of some kind, or high mopery at the least. But — criminal conspiracies
aside — does anyone know if Sony, the publisher, and Mayo created a crippled
product for bundling or is this the way all versions are shipped?? Thanks for
any light you can shed…
Seems like a pretty decent product otherwise.
Kevin, many CD-ROM publishers do not permit or severely limit printing
capabilities in their products in an attempt to enfore copyright restrictions.
In many cases these restrictions are imposed by the company that supplies the
data to the CD-ROM producer. You may be able to get around these restrictions
with the DOS print screen command. There are also several shareware utilities
that will save a screen image as a file. Be sure to read your license
agreement to determine the legality of printing the data.
Thanks for the tips! As with bargain basement stuff of this type, the license
agreement was conveniently missing… Interestingly enough, the registration
card was alive and kicking.
Kevin, The MAYO disc was prepared with Sony's FTR software engine. FTR does not
support export of either images or text directly. As a software engine and
framework, FTR does allow title developers to hook in their own routines to be
executed from within the FTR-based application, but to access the text files in
the structure that they reside on the disc and print a section out would be no
easy task. I know about this because my main product is under FTR and I have
the same problem. Screen capture works fine, but realize that you are
capturing a bit mapped image, not the "text" in any useable fashion.
I am hoping to see some extensions of the basic FTR capability in the future
but have been urging Sony in this direction for some 18 months now with no
success. Live and learn…
Good luck.
Steve Shaffer
MicroDataware