On Sat, Sep 06, 2003 at 09:07:54PM -0600, Dave Thayer wrote: > On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 08:02:24PM +0100, Pigeon wrote: > > I've just been given a copy of the Farnell Electronics catalogue CD. > > This has the unfortunate design of wanting to install some Windoze > > package in order to read the catalogue. > > > > I suspect that they've used a customised version of something fairly > > common in the M$ world; the CD has a number of directories named > > things like 'datadb', 'tabledb', 'worddb', containing files with the > > suffices '.dat' and '.idx'. > > IIRC, the Adobe Acrobat catalog utility uses file names like this. > This utility is used to make a full-text searchable index of a PDF > collection. Perhaps there's another directory tree containing a bunch > of PDFs. > > You have to use a version of Acrobat Reader with Search built in to > access this index, but the linux version lacks this. You shuld still > be able to view the PDFs with linux Acrobat, xpdf or ghostscript > without the search capability. Unfortunately, there are no separate PDFs. The .dat files appear to be files of many different types - HTML, PNG, JPEG, and presumably PDF (although I haven't positively identified a PDF yet, I know there should be some there) - all concatenated together. It would be possible - if tedious - to manually split the different bits apart, but giving them meaningful filenames would be another matter - it would mean manually indexing over 400MB... I did find HTML tags like <META name="oracleid" value="229934"> <META name="tocpath" value="1::Book 2;1::Electronic Components;1::Component Packaging - miniReelTM, Reels & Tubes;1::Capacitor/Resistor Networks"> <META name="smd_tiff" value=""> <META name="PageNo" value=""> in one of the .dat files, though only that one - perhaps an Oracle database is involved? From what I can make out, dbishell can read Oracle data, but it needs a perl module DBD::Oracle to be built, which requires some of the proprietary Oracle code. So it looks like I may be out of luck. In any case, dbishell is a command-line tool, and I need a graphical app to read the graphical data. I've also found some more database files with different suffices which may give someone another clue? .cdx .dbf .edc .edh .edi .edl .edp .eds .edt .edx .fpt .ltf .ods .odt -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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