OVER 2 YOU, 038 (12/07/01)

CIRCUIT DIAGRAMS

I have just started to produce a newsletter for the model boat club that I am the chairman of. One of the regular features I would like to include in future issues is to print both the circuit and schematic diagrams for small and simple electronic projects that would help all the members with this area of the hobby. I have tried to produce them using both the Autoshapes and Draw facility in Microsoft Word, but without too much success. The main problem relates to the symbols for the components such as resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc. Is there any alternative within Microsoft Works suite that I can use? Alternatively does anyone know of a simple and straightforward software package that will help me with the production of circuit diagrams for printing?
Ian Alcock, via email

I use the Spice circuit analysis program from Newbury Technology. It is called  SIMetrix and is available free from www.newburytech.co.uk. Although it is a simulation package, the circuit drawing/capture is the best I have seen. All one has to do is to draw the circuit and then copy and paste into your word processor. All that remains is to crop/size the picture to suit.

Ed Taylor,

I recommend AutoSketch, available for around £50 in chain stores. It is capable of far, far, more than just circuit diagrams, it may therefore seem a little over-complicated at first. However the program contains tutorials, there is a 'quick learning' booklet, and any Microsoft user will recognise the icons. The symbol library contains all manner of electrical items. The initial screen displays a model boat, which must say something in relation to your intended use!

Charles Jones

Smartdraw 5.o is an excellent simple and intuitive program for producing all manner of charts, diagrams, flow charts and the like. A free demonstration is available from http://www.smartdraw.com/
Alan Wright,

Try Target 2001 Schematic & PCB CAD v8.03 by Harald Friedrich. It's free and available from http://ibfriedrich.com/english/. A great little program and easy to use.

Barry,

The Eagle circuit layout editor from http://www.cadsoft.de comes complete with a library of all the symbols he is likely to need in both American and European versions. There is a 'light ' version, which is freeware but it restricts the user's circuit diagram to a single sheet of A4 paper. The package will even generate a printed circuit board layout from the circuit diagram.
Mike Flinders,

COUNCIL MATTERS

I am the Clerk to small Parish Council. I have inherited and added to a heap of documents that are in desperate need of sorting and storing. I have a scanner with a sheet feed, a fairly fast PC with a large hard drive and a CD Writer. I intended scanning in the documents and storing them on CD disks for posterity, especially as the local archives office will take all the paperwork and keep it for evermore. The software that came with the scanner and printer is not suitable for such a task. Can anyone recommend a sensible solution to the scan to archive problem?
David B Horsfall, via email

The answer is a marvellous program called Pagis. The ideal of the paperless office may not yet have been achieved, but Pagis gets closer to it than anything else. It’s simply a matter of feeding your documents through the scanner and letting Pagis compress and store them. Any one of them can be more or less instantly accessed - a facsimile of the page itself pops up on the screen and can then be printed out if desired.

The really clever part however is to let Pagis then create a database, which it does by working silently off-screen, using TextBridge OCR program to read every word of every document. You can then research all this documentation by keying in any word - or a cross selection of words, using the Boolean system - and within seconds the page is there before you, with the relevant word(s) highlighted. The database can be regularly updated, the program knowing which pages are new since the last updating.

Pagis will scan and read not just typed documents but magazine articles, newspaper clippings, whatever - it’s ideal for writers, students, in fact anyone who accumulates information and needs to access it easily. Xerox developed the program originally, but it now marketed by a spin-off company called ScanSoft. It's currently advertised for under £70.

Chris Fitzsimons,

I suggest Visioneer Paperport. It is available from PC World... the latest version costs around £30. It shows thumbnails of all documents scanned in and allows you to file these - you can create sub and sub-sub files. It will also show all My Document files i.e. Word, Excel...  in the same way.

If you have storage capacity problems or 'send' problems you could also use Acrobat Writer in conjunction with Paperport to compress and send documents in a format readable by all - since Acrobat Reader is readily available for free...
Dave Allen,

TOP OF THE FORM

My business revolves around research, both with individuals and small companies. To carry this out, I have two standard forms/questionnaires, which require to be completed by the individual (or company). Normally I post these to the parties concerned, and they then fill them in and post them back to me. However this process takes time and I am sure there is a way of transmitting them by e-mail instead.

My question is - How (or using what application software) do I compile these forms - suitable for use/transmission by e-mail - where the respondee has to complete the answers to various questions, using both data & text entries, and where preferably the respondee cannot alter, or tamper with, my wording/design layout.

Roy McMillan, via email

Caere (www.caere.com) has a product called OmniForm, which will turn any scanned image into an electronic form that can be sent via e-mail as an attachment. This can be sent as a mailable filler, which will not allow changes to the layout or document, but will allow the relevant areas to be filled in. I use it in a day to day IT teaching role and can fully recommend it
Damian O' Toole

A website is probably the best way. I have 3 forms, which my visitors fill in and which are emailed straight back to me in exactly the format I want. You would need to put 4 files on the website - one for each survey, e.g. survey1.htm and survey2.htm, two response emails, e.g. survey1.eml and  survey2.eml, and one ThankYou.htm.

Once set up, you send out emails with the website address, the client goes to the website, fills in the survey, clicks a submit button, gets a Thank You message and the completed form is emailed back to you immediately - and in the format you want. You will need some software to generate the pages with the survey forms and you will need to ask your ISP for a "cgi-bin address".

Once you have generated the web pages and have the cgi-bin address you will need to add some code to the survey1.htm and survey2.htm pages. This is best done by opening the .htm file with Notepad and typing it in. The code should go immediately after the section which
starts <BODY BGCOLOUR="...."  and ends: "VLINK="......">
The code should read:
<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/address-you-got-from-your-

ISP/survey1.eml"
METHOD="post">
<INPUT TYPE="hidden"  NAME="subject" VALUE="Survey1 Response">
<INPUT TYPE="hidden"  NAME="ResponsePage" VALUE="ThankYou.htm">
The FORM ACTION puts the completed Survey1 data into an email [survey1.eml] which the next line calls "Survey1 Response" [the subject heading in the email sent back to you]. The next line causes the Thank You page to open when the form is completed and submitted.

The survey1.eml file is a text file, which must contain data corresponding tothe names of the question data fields in your survey1.htm form. e.g. If you have a series of questions named Q1, Q2, Q3 etc., the survey1.eml would contain the following:

#Q1#
#Q2#
#Q3#

It sounds complicated but it really isn't. Please email me if you have any questions.
Tana Johnson,

ALL IN THE GAME

I am looking for a game, which could be similar in type to a football manager game, but on a sword and sorcery theme. I do not want anything hectic, with shooting and fighting, but something which would be relaxing to play, and which would carry on over a period of time. Does anyone know of anything, which might fit the bill?

Ralph Butler, via email

It sounds to me as if Ralph Butler is looking for a turn-based (or Play By e-Mail) game. It's possible for lots of players to join the same interactive game and play for months, by sending their orders to a central moderator. There's a huge range of turn-based games – war games, role-playing games, sports games etc. For fantasy adventure games, I'd recommend Dungeonworld (from Madhouse, www.madcentral.com) and Quest (from KJC Games, www.kjcgames.com).

Carol Mulholland,

I suggest Ralph Butler tries Monkey Island by Lucas Arts (www.lucasarts.com). There are currently four in the series (Monkey Island, Monkey 2:LeChuck's Revenge, The Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island). They are all very entertaining "point and click adventure games" with a piratey theme. The first 3 are available in a multi-pack quite cheaply.

Michael Morley,

PEN FRIENDS

Could you tell me the addresses of some UK pen friends organizations, which can be joined by foreigners?
 I. A. S, via email

The web site www.horsedata.co.uk has listings of what seem like hundreds of people looking for pen pals at www.horsedata.co.uk/

GeeGees/Penpals/pen_pals.htm.
Richard Stevens,

REMOVING RETURNS

I often receive information in plain text format and would like to put it into Word documents or a web page. Usually this results in a boring session clicking the end of each line and pressing delete to "join up" all the text by getting rid of "hard" carriage returns etc. Does anyone know of a utility, which will do this automatically?  Usually it's not too long a job but I just got a text document that is a megabyte long!
Richard Limebear, via email

Mr Limebear needs Text Cleanup, from www.comp4learn.com/cleaner/. It will remove unwanted line breaks, adjust spacing between words, paragraphs, and sentences, identify and format lists, and remove e-mail reply marks.  You can specify the level of cleaning and reformatting. It can clean up text automatically when it's copied to the Clipboard, or you can work in a Cleanup Window and do (as well as undo) things to selections of the text only. It works, and it's fast. It's shareware but well worth the $20 (£15 or so) registration fee.

Dr Philip Bosworth, Blandford Forum, Dorset

CAN YOU HELP?

I am very interested in installing solar powered heating and possibly electrical systems in my home. Can it be done in our climate? Are there any web sites that can help me to figure out the cost and practicalities?

Norman Stevens, via email

I have a problem transferring publications produced using PageMaker on a Mac to PageMaker on a PC. I had hoped to achieve this by sending them from the Mac to the PC as e-mail attachments but PageMaker on the PC will not open them. When I try I get an error message saying 'This file format cannot be opened using this application'. The files have been saved on a CD-ROM in the Mac but of course the PC cannot 'see', let alone read them.
Ian Penfold, via email

I am using a excel spreadsheet to track items and the countif function to use letters to signify different items. However, I cannot find a way to differentiate between upper and lower case letters.  I wish to use lower case to count the value of a half and upper case the value of one. Can this be done?  I have already used the help function to review the entire function list, but to no avail.
David Howarth, via email

I use Power Publisher, it has limited editing facilities but 'Crop' is useful. I use 'Save As', to compress files in JPEG format, however, sometimes it will not accept black and white photos. These appear on the editing side of the screen as streaks, skewed horizontally. Does anyone know how can I make it accept black and white images?

Brian Stephens, Penarth, Glam.

Does anyone know of a free or cheap method of password protecting or encrypting data stored on a CD-R? I want to be able to protect the data, only allowing those with the password to access it, but the solution must not copy the CD data to the hard disk (so using WinZip for example is no good).

Justin L Partridge, via email