mystery dac

That happens a lot when you try to open a PDF online when using the browser plugin, but I don't recall the last problem using the stand alone Acrobat Reader, other than the occasion corrupted downloaded PDF file.

Is this a Windoze box? I've found that it's a very, very bad idea to store data on your system drive, because you lose it all when Windoze crashes and you have to reinstall it.

Good Luck! Rich

Hello Michael,

Corrupted can also mean incompatible. IMHO Adobe has not done a great job with compatibility. Goes something like this: Incompatibility message pops up, can't read this that and the other thing message pops up, ....trundling... Ka-crash.

Regards, Joerg

I assume windows will die now and then (although XP seems a lot better than the last decade+ of Microsoft crap), and that hard drives will die too. That's why I keep a spare hard drive in a baggie, a perfect mirror copy of a known-good system, with all apps installed. And I keep backups of work-in-process, email, all that stuff, on D:, another hard drive (not just a partition); and backup to a network drive and burn weekly dvd's; and copy active projects to a flash stick, and take that home and copy everything onto my home pc, an identical copy of my dual-drive work PC.

Paranoid enough? The only better thing might be RAID.

Last serious crash I had was a C: hard drive failure at home. I grabbed a spare drive, mirror-copied my C: drive at work, and took that home and plugged it in as the new C:

I can't use Linux, because many important apps wouldn't be available.

John

It's still better to put the data on a different partition, if not another drive.

RAID isn't all it's cracked up to be. It doesn't prevent the most common cause of data loss (the loose nut behind the keyboard).

I use Linux mostly for net stuff at home and to learn... Linux. ;-)

Hello John,

RAID in the same location won't likely help when the big one strikes. Sometimes contracts require that backups be stored a certain distance away. I had one that required 2km and I lucked out because that was just the distance where my backups where. I thought this would be a bit overboard. Until that night when we heard a loud kaboom, saw an orange glow in the west with an incredible black plume on top and sirens wailed everywhere. I thought that the very building where my backups were must have a ruptured natural gas line or something. Turned out it was a car right behind it. Some crazy folks had set it on fire and the gas tank exploded.

Regards, Joerg

I look at the bad files, and they usually have some HTML or other non adobe crap mixed in where the server corrupted the download.

Hello Michael,

Yeah but, when I look at a file from National or TI and one day it works fine, a couple days the very same file crashes it, the week after it's fine again?

Regards, Joerg

Adobe does weird things irrespective of operating system.

...Jim Thompson

Put symbolic links in the relevant subdirs. They're references to the file, which stays where it is, and don't take up much room. You might even have all the files in a single repository and spread the links around in the cataloguing tree. The downside is if you [re]move a file you'll have to find and remove or change the links.

- YD.

I haven't run into that problem.

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 17:18:20 GMT, Joerg wrote in Msg.

OpenOffice costs nothing and has decent native PDF export. I use it all the time without trouble.

robert

I have one prized 2-page PDF datasheet that prints at the rate of about 2 minutes per page, on a 2.5 GHz Pentium.

I wrote my own "print driver" for text files; drag a ascii file onto the icon, and it begins printing instantly, just like the good-ole DOS days.

John

Hello Robert,

Yes, and I want to try it out soon. However, I have to mind what others use to read my documentation. If they use Acrobat then the problems are there again. With HTML I have rarely seen issues.

Regards, Joerg

Back in the day of paper data sheets, we used the EEM file system. This used a four digit number for categories, such as 1500 for capacitors. There were additional sub folders based on the component sub-type. They published an index whereby you could look up any component type in an index and find the correct file number, and provided nice category lables for the file folders.

As we morphed into the internet age, we essentially duplicated this file system on our server. The only difference is that under each file number we categorize components in manufacturer folders.

Our parts managemement database has links for each part to the datasheet in the database. Our electronic database now has about

We emptied the file cabinets last year of the old paper data sheets in order to make space. Now our electronic filing system looks strange, but we won't change it because this would break all the datasheet links in our parts database. If you go to

================================

Greg Neff VP Engineering

Hello John,

I had several where the Acrobat printing in progress message was still there when I came back from lunch :-)

Those were the days. Ok, you couldn't install one driver for a new printer and it would work for all apps. Then again, even with Windows that doesn't always work.

OrCad was very kind when I bought a new and not yet supported printer. They sent me a generic file for SDT-III along with detailed docs. I cannot remember one hang-up, ever. Other than when a rubber band somehow made it into the intake tractor.

Regards, Joerg

HTML is OK if the documentation is supposed to read only on-screen (in my experience, browser printouts are just plain ugly), and if you can ensure that all the related files are present, have the proper names and are in their respective directories.

As for PDF: I usually am on Linux and use xpdf (simple, no features, just a reader) or Acrobat Reader 5 on Windows. I don't know hoe newer versions behave.

robert

Do you do some work at home? How do you synchronize the content of your home and work computers? I'd like to use one as a backup for the other, but I'm constantly putting files in odd places on both machines, and lacking a good enough tool, fall behind in keeping them together. I use LapLink to synchronize file folders, but it's too slow, taking forever to scan the mostly-identical content and determine which files to transfer (it does file transfers very quickly, and has a neat "speed-sync" scheme for large files with nearly-identical content).

Why don't they do CRCC calculations independently on both ends and quickly compare the results, say folder-by-folder, or better, instead of a bog-slow file-by-file comparison? I imagine they've thought of this scheme, but are prevented by someone's patent from using it.

Yes, I use such links, which are nice because you can be verbose and clarify what's to be found in the file. But this is time consuming to create and I don't have very many in comparison to my perhaps 40k of datasheet and appnote files. I haven't tried Google desktop, or any other schemes that have been suggested.