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An emergency has prompted this mostly-lurker (??) to delurk and
ask for your help. I need some recommendations for software
packages ASAP. Details below ...
A little background: My company is an onsite contractor at a DOE
facility. The DOE contract task monitor for my group (of 2)
walked in this morning and announced that he was considering
putting a request TO SPEND SOME MONEY for some software
purchases and wanted us to make some recommendations by close of
business today. As I'm sure you can guess, this kind of largesse
(if it pans out) is quite rare, so I want to take advantage of
it. I have deadlines to meet today and can't spend much time
doing research. This may be our only chance to spend money in
who knows how long, however, so I want to get the products that
best meet our needs. Unfortunately, I haven't given this any
serious thought in months, so I don't know which products are
even out there. If, after looking over the description of what
we do and my perception of deficiencies I'd like to fill, you
have any specific suggestions, we would love to hear from you.
What we do: Create and convert documents to HTML for the World
Wide Web.
What we have:
* IBM PC-compatible computers running MS Windows
* WordPerfect 5.2 (network) WordPerfect 6.1 (local)
* OmniMark (used for parsing and some customized conversion
utilities)
* shareware/freeware such as LView, Mosaic, Netscape
What we need:
* We've been doing screen captures (usually of graphics) using
the print screen capability built into the PC. A more
flexible/powerful screen capture program would be helpful.
* Graphics conversion programs. If we can display the graphic,
we do a screen capture to bitmap, clean it up in MS Paintbrush,
and convert to gif using LView. Again, there's got to be a
better way -- more flexible/powerful software would be great.
* We're looking at FastTag as a conversion utility (in addition
to the OmniMark programs our programmers have created, which
take ASCII input). Most of our files to convert come in in
WordPerfect, but other packages also show up. Suggestions for
conversion packages would also be helpful.
* Anything you can see that we're missing and not even aware of.
I'm putting this together in a hurry, so I hope I haven't left
anything out. Please send your recommendations (with supporting
reasons) DIRECTLY TO ME, since I'm on the digest and won't
receive another digest before close of business.
You guys are great! Thanks a million!
Michele Berkes
writer/editor
NCI Information Systems, Inc.
Michele -dot- Berkes -at- ccmail -dot- osti -dot- gov
