Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 19:10:29 10/29/03
Go up one level in this thread
On October 29, 2003 at 22:04:59, Mike Byrne wrote:
>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.
Just for clarification - Adobe Pocket PC Acrobat Reader does not read eBooks.
The PC flavor ,of course, does read eBooks.
>
>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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