Experience in a Book
About this Web Site

This web site contains most of the contents of Kirby Palm's Experience in a Book: Help for the XJ-S Jaguar Owner (otherwise referred to as "the Book") which is usually distributed in the form of a Microsoft Word file for free over the Internet. Kirby is contually and continuously updating the document, so this web site will probably be quite "out of date" by the time you read this. Therefor it is strongly recommended that you download the most up-to-date copy of the book from Kirby's web site and refer to that information directly for any repairs or diagnostic work on your XJ-S Jaguar.

This web site is based on the August 19, 1998 version of the Book.

The Book was converted to HTML by Vaughan Bromfield. Some inaccuracies have inevitably been introduced during the conversion process -- notably, some symbols used in the original Word document have no direct match in html. So if an odd symbol appears in the web version, please refer to the original Word file on Kirby's web site for the correct meaning.

Because of the huge amount of information contained in the Book, not all of it has been incorporated into this web site. All of the Maintenance Tips and Modifications sections of the Book have been converted and included here; Where to Find Help, Parts Etc. and all subsequent sections -- in truth a relativley small part of the Book -- have not been included. Download the Book to get this information.

For those interested in the nuts and bolts, it took Microsoft Word 97 on a Pentium computer about one hour to convert the Word document into html format -- I'm not sure because I started it off then went to lunch. The product of this process was a single, 1.7 MB web page and thirty gif images. About forth hours (yeah four full working days) was then spent turning that single, huge html file into a web site using Claris Home Page on a Macintosh computer. This involved:

• breaking up the single file into over thirty (almost) manageable pages
• making a simple but elegant design for the site that would facilitate easy conversion (remember, this book is B-I-G)
• cleaning up the html formatting that Word produced -- creating dozens of tables and making the dozens of web site and cross-references in the book into clickable links, formatting the headings and where required the body text
• creating the Table of Contents and linking it all together
• and finally checking everything as much as possible to catch the bugs.

To make all of this manageable, the text in the original Word document has been converted with the minimum anount of changes possible. This has meant that some compromise has been made between speed, and taking advantage of all of the features of the web format.

I hope you find this web site useful. My thanks go to Kirby for creating and maintaining this document in the first place. -- Vaughan Bromfield

  Experience in a Book