Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 19:04:59 10/29/03
One of the mosted noted Soviet chess trainers , Mikhail Shereshevsky, wrote a
book in the early 1990's , "The Soviet Chess Conveyor". Perhaps the title was
not perfectly translated - but Mikhail is considered one of the best teachers
for serious young chess players andone of the true "conveyors" of Soviet chess
knowledge. Genenerally his students were over 2000 Fide, but his book is clearly
worthwhile for any seriuous student of the game rated 1700 or higher USCF.
The book is available through many online ebook merchants - Amazon carries the
book for $8.
I am not here to plug the book, but the book is excellent. My tale is of my
first ebook purchase experience.
In a word, it was "frustrating". "The Soviet Chess Conveyor" was first my ebook
purchase - it was consistently raved by all readers, and in fact many titled
players read his works. The book is not for beginners. I thought $8 was very
inexpensive to buy a 536 page book of this quality.
I purchased it Saturday. Recently Adobe combined their Acrobat Reader with
their Ebook Reader - it is called "Adobe Reader 6" . The reader must be
activated before you can read an ebook. Ok , I can deal with that. That was my
first mistake - I spent all day (Saturday) trying to activate the Reader. I
will make story short here - but I was not the only one having this much fun.
If want to read more about the fun we had Saturday - some of it is documented is
here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=2ccdfb68.9%40webx.la2eafNXanI&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dadobe.acrobat.ebook.reader
Tuesday , as noted in the thread above, my eBook reader finally got acvtivated.
Awesome, I will have this great chess ebook for my trips on the train to read
with Dell Axim.
Wrong again! In Adobe's infinite ebook wisdom, their Acrobat Reader does not
read ebooks. Period. No activation, nothing.
And Adobe's Reader for the PC does NOT allow printing, does NOT capture text -
basicaly you increase / decrease the page size - add your own notes (which you
cannot print either) - and that's it - oh they have a little snapshot screen
tool to capture a screen shot - how convenient (heavy sarcasm) - you can copy
and paste one page a time to word and then print the page out. That sounds like
a lot of fun for a 536 page book (more heavy sarcasm). Their vision of "ebook
reading" is that you will sit in front of your PC and read. "HELLOO, Earth to
Mars, eBook future (if it has a future ) is on the PDA - not on the PC." It
does not exactly take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. But Adobe is
not known for their rocket scientists either - just ask some of the cryptology
experts inthe world.
Well now, I'm on a mission - I want to be able to print that book , snap it in a
binder and get SOMETHING for my $8. There are NO refunds on ebooks by the way -
AT ALL.
A little search turned up a program - "Win Task" great program. There is a full
featured demo that is good for 30 days. In a few minutes, I had written a
little scrip that uses the built in snapshot tool of Adobe, paste it into MS
Word and (theorectically) I could print the entire book with one button click.
Today, I did print it with one click of a button. It's a great chess book, Win
Task is a great program ( the author gave me a great, great discount -- nowhere
near list, when I mentioned that I was just using his program to print my ebook
out). You can even use Win Task to program Chessbase to grab the new TWIC games
every week and schedule it - totally automatic.
Here's the little script I wrote that will work with Win Task to print ebooks
from Adobe Reader 6. You need to have Adobe Reader open and on the first page.
MS Word is open with a blank page. ( I could automate that aspect as well).
Also make sure you have the snapshot took selected (another automation that I
could have done.
Sorry for the slightly offtopic post - but it does relate to chess and computers
- just not in the usual way that we are accustomed to.
Best,
Michael
eBook_print.src
=============================================================
CallDialog Dialog
CallDialog PageD
BEGINDIALOG Dialog 337, 260, 350, 110
CAPTION "Adobe eBook Print by Michael F. Byrne"
TEXT "Adobe eBook Print 1.0 by Michael F. Byrne", 59, 15
DEFPUSHBUTTON "&OK", btnOK, 125, 41, 75, 23
ENDDIALOG
BEGINDIALOG PageD 337, 260, 350, 138
CAPTION "Number of pages to convert"
TEXT "Please enter the number of pages to convert:", 55, 19
EDITTEXT pages$, 128, 42, 78, 20
DEFPUSHBUTTON "&OK", btnOK, 130, 78, 75, 23
ENDDIALOG
pages=val(pages$)
repeat
UseWindow("ACRORD32.EXE|AVL_AVView|AVPageView",1)
SendKeys("<Ctrl a><Ctrl c>")
UseWindow("WINWORD.EXE|_WwG|Document1|1",1)
SendKeys("<Ctrl a><Ctrl v><Alt o>p")
UseWindow("WINWORD.EXE|bosa_sdm_Microsoft Word 9.0|Paragraph",1)
SendKeys("c<Enter>")
SendKeys("<Enter>")
UseWindow("WINWORD.EXE|_WwG|Document1|1",1)
SendKeys("<Ctrl p>")
UseWindow("WINWORD.EXE|RichEdit20W|Print|6",1)
SendKeys("<Enter>")
UseWindow("ACRORD32.EXE|AVL_AVView|AVPageView",1)
SendKeys("<Right>")
pages=pages-1
until pages<1
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Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
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