The editors are pleased to announce that BMCR has produced a Word-based CD containing all paper reviews through 1996 (vol.1.1-7.8, 1990-96), an index to the paper reviews, and all electronic reviews and notes for the same period (1.1.1 to 96.12.7), unfortunately without index. The price, including shipping, is $8.00 (add $1 for international airmail). Please send orders and payment to Richard Hamilton, Department of Greek, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr PA 19010. The disk works with both Macintosh and DOS/Windows systems, but there are some limitations: Herewith two sets of comments on the CD.
Jim O’Donnell:
Works only so-so with my fairly high-end Windows NT Pentium machine. The problem is that I use WordPerfect, and the version I have (6.1 for Windows) doesn’t recognize MS Word 4.0 or have a conversion factor for it. I can futz around and find a format that will open and read things fairly well, but the printed versions lose their umlauts and most files begin with a little gibberish. I assume if I had some version of MS Word on my machine, it would work fine.
Penny Small:
I can access the CD-ROM with no problem whatsoever using the Windows Explorer [comes with every copy of Windows 95]. I do recommend, however, that QuickView be installed [also comes with Win95, but is not part of the default installation], since its default viewer is the one I used to look at both the “electron” and “printed” sub-directories. While the electron directory displayed just like the e-mail version, the printed had problems with the Greek, but, interestingly enough not with italics or the foreign accents which were just fine. You can also use the Windows Explorer search/find function to find any word within a file.
The only problem here is that the default Win95 viewers/searchers don’t seem to come with a means of highlighting or finding the word you want once you’ve opened the file in QuickView. If you use Notepad, you can do a search for the specific word, but the formatting leaves much to be desired, since it puts in an upper ASCII symbol rather than carriage returns. You can of course use your word processor to view the file, etc. Now, this is the best part. The new WordPerfect 7.0 (for Win95) comes with an enhanced QuickFinder which lets you have virtually all you might want. “Virtually” because it won’t display the printed versions, though it does search them. What’s nifty about this is that QuickFinder comes with full Boolean searching capabilities. You can also quickly display the text in a window to the right of the list of hits. It will, by right-clicking, pop up a menu that enables you to find the word you want within a file, which it then highlights in blue — a real time saver in files of 50K. Also, since the viewer is quick and you can see the file immediately, you know which review you want to “transfer” to your word processor or deep six.
In response to Jim O’Donnell’s comment, I can add that MS Word 7.0 does, indeed, read both directories (electron and printed). In the “printed” set of files, it displays italics, underlining, etc. The Greek is accurately transliterated with appropriate long marks.