I would like to thank all who responded and tell you about the solution
we found.
First of all, with some support from somewhere, we managed to re-install
the BookManager software
on the z/OS 2.5 system - unsupported / as-is. This, at least, allows us
to read the books temporarily
and to start the conversion from here.
Then I copied the needed books (some hundred) to Bookmaster GML format,
which can be done
from inside READ/MVS. The MVS (or z/OS) version converts complete books
to Bookmaster GML,
not only single paragraphs. The Bookmaster files (which are textfiles in
the end) then were moved
to a PC (using text FTP).
Then I used B2H (the Windows variant) to create HTML from the Bookmaster
files. I changed the
B2H REXX a little bit, so that all texts are enclosed in <PRE> tags;
this way the line breaks etc.
from the original documents are preserved.
Task completed :-)
Some additional remarks:
the internal layout of the .BOO files is not usable and very difficult;
4096 byte segments, word fragments
in EBCDIC, maybe some sort of linked list or tree structure. I spent
some time trying to understand this,
but no success.
I also tried to find the Bookmaster sources - as suggested by some
posters - at my customer's site
for the books, which were present in the "production" bookshelves, but
also no success;
the sources were partially lost and the people responsible for the books
have retired.
So it was best to retrieve the Bookmaster sources from the books directly.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 28.02.2023 um 18:59 schrieb Bernd Oppolzer:
What is the preferred way to convert BookMgr books to PDF?
My customer has some home-written BookMgr books, which they cannot access
after the z/OS migration (BookMgr support was dropped with z/OS 2.4).
We managed to transfer the books to Windows (and OS/2, BTW), where we can
at least look at the books. Now I would like to convert the books to
PDFs.
But the free Softcopy Reader refuses to print more than one (selected)
topic
or ranges of topics; if you try to do this using the print menu
(selected or range),
the output is always empty.
Is this a bug - or: is printing larger portions of text not allowed in
the free version?
What are the options?
The eMail address [email protected], which is mentioned in the
Softcopy Reader
help texts, doesn't exist any more (BTW: the Softcopy Reader is a 2012
edition;
this seems to be the last one available).
Is there a documented API to read the books using a C or REXX program
and build the PDFs this way? Or build HTML from the books?
Thanks for all suggestions,
kind regards
Bernd
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
