Please note that Industrial Press no longer supports this old software program as it will not run on newer machines and operating systems. The archival instructions below, collected to assist with troubleshooting usage and reinstallation issues, are provided solely as a courtesy to our loyal customers.
Good news is that there is an upgrade option: As a previous edition Handbook CD-ROM owner, you are eligible to upgrade to the Machinery’s Handbook 32 Digital Edition Upgrade. (The discounted Upgrade version of this digital product is identical to the regular Digital Edition, except that you must enter your previous edition MH CD-ROM registration number or have a current subscription to a previous edition MH digital product at our eBookStore site.) You can see the full Machinery’s Handbook Product Family and combination packages by clicking here.
As supplied on the CD-ROM, the Machinery’s Handbook, 25th Edition, CD-ROM cannot be installed under Windows 7 or any other 64-bit operating systems for the reason that the installer does not operate correctly in that environment. Even if you could install it, the underlying DynaText browser will not work.
Chris McCauley, creator of this product and related programming, developed a workaround procedure that might get it going on Windows 7 and other early operating systems. Please see the following three links below:
- Version 1.0 CD: See “MH25 CD-ROM Version 1.0 FAQs” below.
- Install CD Files to Hard Drive: See “How to Install Machinery’s Handbook Version 1.0 CD on a Hard Drive” below.
- Install Version 1 CD on 64-Bit Windows Operating Systems: See “Install MH Version 1 CD on 64-bit Windows Operating System” below.
MH25 CD-ROM Version 1.0 FAQs
| General Q. Is the Machinery’s Handbook CD Y2K compliant? A. No, however, the Handbook files do not use or require any date functions, therefore, they do not return any invalid dates. Installation Q. Can I install the program under Unix? A. Unix is not supported. Q. Is there a Mac version of the program?A. There is no Mac version of the MH25 CD-ROM. It also will not run on the newest operating systems. Q. I got an error message concerning CTL3D32.DLL. A. Make sure you are not copying an installation file set from a computer with a different operating system. Do not install the program over the network; use the CD-ROM to install it directly on the computer. Q. How do I install the data files from the CD onto my hard drive so I don’t have to keep the CD in the drive all the time? A. Follow the instructions given in the the following page: How to install Machinery’s Handbook CD V1.0 (25th edition only) data files on a hard drive Printing Q. Some tables containing graphics do not print. A. In the menu bar go to “File”-“Print Setup”-“Properties and set the print quality “300 dpi”. If print quality is set to 300 dpi, try printing at a lower resolution. A. Try to print in the landscape mode. Or, if available, try using a PCL driver software for HP printers. Q. Graphics print in the portrait mode but not in the landscape mode. A. Make sure your printer supports the landscape mode. For HP printers, use the PCL driver option instead of the “HP HOST BASED” driver option Q. Table prints, but table title does not print. A. This occurs if tables are printed when opened in a locked-title view. To print a table with it’s title, close the table and place the mouse cursor on the table title in the document window and press the right mouse button. You will see two choices for displaying the table. Select the “Normal view” and you should see the table title above the table. Try to print the table again. Some tables can only be opened in a single view. Titles for these tables should print correctly. Display Q. Window does not fit the screen, can’t see some text. A. You have to resize and relocate the DynaText window on the monitor, so you can see it all. To move the window you have to place the mouse cursor on the Title Bar- the very top line where you can see “DynaText 3.1” text. Press and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse, it will move the window around. Place the window in the location on the screen c, so you can see one of the corners of the window. Release the left mouse button. Move the cursor, so it is placed over the corner and changes its shape to the double-headed arrow. Press and hold the left mouse button then move the mouse cursor towards to the center of the window. This will reduce the size of the window. Repeat the resizing and moving of the window until you see it all. Q. I can’t see the search (“Find”) field. A. Move or resize the window as described in the previous question. You should see a search (“Find”) field, located at the bottom of the document window, and another search field located at the bottom of the collection window. Q. Text and graphics appear blurred. A. Your screen resolution may be too low for best viewing. To change your screen resolution in Windows 95 or Windows NT: Place your mouse cursor over an empty area of your desktop and right clickSelect “Properties” from the menu that appears, and then choose the “Settings” tab on the “Display Properties” dialog box that appears. Locate the slide-bar control below the text “Screen area” and use the mouse to move the slide-bar to the right, thereby increasing the screen resolution.Click on “Apply” to accept the change Operation Q. How to adjust the text size. A. You can adjust the text size by changing the “Zoom” setting in the “View” menu. Click on the “View” menu, place mouse cursor on the “Zoom” option, and choose one of the zoom settings that appear in the menu to the right. Increasing the zoom factor causes the text to appear larger, and decreasing the zoom factor causes the text to appear smaller. Q. DynaText opens, Machinery’s Handbook is visible in the collection window, but the section titles (books) are not visible. A. Make sure the CD-ROM is in the CD-ROM drive. A. Make sure that the COLLECTION line in the dynatext.ini file correctly points to the location of the MACHBOOK directory on the CD. Q. Can I copy a table and paste it into a spreadsheet or word processor? A. No. You can, however, copy and paste small amounts of text. Q. Can I copy and paste a graphic or equation?A. No, however, all graphics and equations are available on the CD. Q. How can I enlarge a graphic or equation? A. Single click on a figure to open up an enlarged view. You can further enlarge the window by placing the mouse cursor on a corner of the window, so the cursor changes to double-headed arrow. Press and hold the left mouse button and drag the corner away from the window. Release the mouse button when the size of the window is large enough. Q. What is the difference between the normal and locked-title view of a table? A. If you have the locked-title view then you can scroll down the body of the table while the header rows stay locked in place. Q. Every time I open the Handbook, the zoom is set to 100% and I need to increase the magnification each time. How do I get the program to remember my zoom settings? A. Open the “File” menu, click on “Preferences”, select “Book Window” under “Category” and type in a magnification in the “Zoom” field. The new magnification becomes the default value. Searching Q. How do I find a particular page? A. Use the “Quick Page Finder””Quick Page Finder” is in the Machinery’s Handbook Collection window. It is the last book in the “Title” pane. To open the “Quick Page Finder” double click on it. In the Quick Page Finder window, click on the triangle in the left-hand pane (table of contents view) to display a range of page number. Click on the triangle next to the range of pages that includes the page you want to find.In the right-hand pane, double click on the page number to open up that page. A. Use the Search FormsIf you want to find a page number in a particular book that is already open, you can go to the “Search” menu, then choose “Search Forms” and from the drop down menu on the right of the text “Search Form:” choose “Page Number Search”. In the “Page:” field, type in the page number and click on the “Find” button. A. Open the Table of Contents with Page Numbers Go to “View” choose “TOC” and click on “Contents with Page Numbers” Q. How do I find a topic? A.Open a book that you think your topic may be in.In the left window you can see the Table of Contents (TOC) for the book.You can expand the headings by clicking on the triangles. To expand all headings at the same time click on the “View” menu then place the mouse cursor on the “Expand TOC to”. In the opened list choose “All levels”.In the left part of the window you can see all of the topics of the book.You can display the contents of a topic in the right window by single click on it. A. You can also use the “Find” field to search for a particular topic, in one section only, or throughout the whole book.From the “Collection” window, type your search topic in the “Find” field and press “Enter” on the keyboard.After a few moments, the number of “Hits” or successful finds is displayed next to the titles in the “Title” pane.You can further refine your search by selecting “titles” from the drop-down menu found next to the word “Inside” on the right side of the “Find” field. Select Enter again to search only in the document titles. Q. How can I find a particular table? A. Type in a part of the table title in the “Find” field and select Enter on the keyboard. A. Open a book that you want to find a table in. Go to “View”, choose “TOC”, click on “Menu of Tables”. This will display the titles of all tables contained in this section. Click on the triangles to show all the tables for the particular heading. Q. When I try to search I get the message “Invalid Query Expression”. A. Don’t use restricted punctuation and symbols (), =, <>, “, []. If you need to use these characters anyway, then use quotation marks (single or double ones). Q. When I try to search I get the message “Word is on the stop list”. A. This means that a word that you are looking for is very common (occurs too often in the document to be indexed) or is a “reserved word” that has a special meaning in a search (such as “and” and “or”). The words on the stop list are not indexed. Use synonyms for that word, or enclose the word(s) in double quotes and try your search again. The help for DynaText 3.1 has a lot of information on this matter. Q. How do I cancel a search? A. Press the “Clear”  button on the menu.Q. I keep seeing a message “No occurrences found”. Why? A. You have entered a term that is either not in the book or is described in a slightly different way. Example: For a search query “die sets” the program returns the message “No occurrences found”, but for the query “die set” it returns several “Hits”. |
How to Install Machinery’s Handbook Version 1.0 CD on a Hard Drive
| The following instructions will allow you to run “Machinery’s Handbook Version 1.0” directly from your computer’s hard drive. You may want to do this for the following reasons: 1) The program will run more quickly if it is using the hard drive compared to a slower CD-ROM drive. 2) Preserve the ability to run other CD-ROM based programs from your computer’s CD-ROM drive bay. You MAY NOT install your program on a hard drive as a way of allowing multiple users to have access to ONE legal copy of the program unless you own a site license. To install the “Machinery’s Handbook” data files to your hard drive follow these steps: 1) Make sure you have approximately 175 megabytes of free space on your hard drive for the data files. You will also need 9 megabytes of hard drive space for the DynaText browser program. 2) Install “Machinery’s Handbook” following the installation prompts in the setup program. Make a note of the installation directory; the default installation directory is c:\MacHBook 3) After installation is complete, copy the “MacHBook” folder and its contents from the CD into the MacHBook\data\handbook directory of your hard drive. If you used the default directory to install the progrtam in Step 2) above, you will be copying the data files into the c:\MacHBook\data\handbook directory. Note: The data files from the CD may be placed in any suitable location in any local hard drive on your system, however, you will need to record the location of the data files in the COLLECTION line of the dynatext.ini file as described in Step 4) 4) From the “Windows 95” “Start” button open up the “Programs” folder and then select the “Machinery’s Handbook” folder. Select the “Dynatext.INI File” item to open the dynatext.ini file in a text editor. Be sure that you are using a text editor that saves files as “plain text.” The dynatext.ini file is located in the “bin” folder of the installation directory (c:\MacHBook is the default). 5) Change the following line in the dynatext.ini file: FROM: COLLECTION=x:\MacHBook=”Machinery’s Handbook” TO: COLLECTION=c:\MacHBook\data\handbook\MacHBook=”Machinery’s Handbook” Where “x” is your CD-ROM drive letter, and, “c:\MacHBook\data\handbook\MacHBook” is location to which you installed the data files in Step 3. 6) Save the “Dynatext.INI File” file as a “plain” text file. 7) Remove the CD from the drive and launch “Machinery’s Handbook” from the “Windows 95” “Start” “Programs” menu. 8) If this does not work properly you can always uninstall the program and then reinstall from the CD. |
Install MH Version 1 CD on 64-bit Windows Operating System
| These instructions represent a workaround for installing Machinery’s Handbook 25 CD on Windows 64-bit computers (XP and Vista, or Windows 7). The CD won’t install on 64-bit machines because the installer does not run under that OS (since it was developed in the late 90s and is undoubtably full of 16-bit code.) These instructions suggest a way that you can get it setup for testing with a little bit of tinkering. To do this, you will need to: 1) install the MH25 CD on another machine where the installation works, such as win 2000, Xp, or 32-bit Vista; 2) locate and copy the entire MacHBook directory that gets created by that install, and paste it to a convenient location on your 64-bit machine harddrive. I suggest that you put the MacHBook directory at the root level of one of your drives, such as C:\, or D:\, for example; 3) in the bin subdirectory of the MacHBook directory that you copied to the 64-bit machine, locate the file ebtcom.reg. This file creates required registry entries. You can open this file with a text editor to see what registry edits are being made. These registry entries need to be added to the 32-bit registry, as follows:go to the Start menu and select Run, and type in the following: %systemroot%\syswow64\regedit and then click OK. This should open up a view of the 32-bit registry. Then select Registry -> Import Registry File and select the file ebtcom.reg located in the C:\MacHbook\bin directory (assuming you copied the files in Step 1 to the C:/ drive). This should load them in the 32-bit registry. Close the registry editor. 4) locate the file DynaText.ini, also in the bin subdirectory, and edit the lines shown below (they will be slightly different than what you see here): the collection line should point to your CD drive letter; the other lines should point to the harddrive location where you pasted the MacHBook directory: COLLECTION=R:\MacHBook=”Machinery’s Handbook” PUBLIC_DIR=C:\MacHBook\Annots\Public PRIVATE_DIR=C:\MacHBook\Annots\Private DATA_DIR=C:\MacHBook\data LIBRARY_PATH=C:\MacHBook\lib DTEXT_AUTH=C:\MacHBook\data\security\full.lic PLUGIN_DIRS=C:\MacHBook\lib\plugins 5) Finally, try to start the browser by opening Dtext.exe, also located in the bin directory. Your CD should be in the drive. If its going to work at all, I think this should do it. 6) If that works you can create a shortcut to Dtext.exe for your desktop or elsewhere. |