Re: pedit/pToolSet

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 6:55 AM, Paul Nevai <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear Friends:
>
> Some of you asked me if pedit/pToolSet will move to other platforms.  I
> don't plan to do so.

Out of curiosity, how difficult would a port be?  My suspicion is that
pedit might be the better target for any such effort, as it's a
general purpose editor.  A lot of ptoolset is tied to PalmOS specific
functions which may not have equivalents in other OSes.

You *could* make it open source at some point... :-)

> I am still a Palm OS guy with 2 Centros and I am quite satisfied with them.

I still use my Tapwave Zodiac 2 on a regular basis.  It's a pure PDA,
not a smartphone, but I don't *want* a smartphone.  I prefer my PDA
and my phone to be separate instruments.

> My Treo 755p is now retired although I still use it as a GPS (TomTom
> Navigator 5). My other dozen or so Palms/keyboards/modems/styluses/etc. are
> fully retired.
>
> Let me make a confession; just between you and me, please don't publicize it:
> for some time now I gave complimentary registrations to all who requested it.
>
> I plan one final compilation and release sometime in the near future.  There
> are no known current bugs and there will be no new features.

> BTW, pTextTool is my most used tool now.

What new features *could* be added?  It sounds like pretty much
everything desirable has already been requested/implemented.

> From 3rd party software, I still use TealDoc, Plucker, JFile, FileMan,
> BackupMan, and a number of utils by hobbyistsoftware.com + MakeDocJ on my
> Mac.  The latter is by our peditor Jeffrey Krzysztow. As far as I know all
> these were actually created and programmed by their developers themselves.
> Except for the Plucker man (or maybe people), I know all of them well. I am
> grateful to them for their superb work.

In the case of Plucker, it's "people".  David Derossiers is the main
dev, but an assortment of other folks like Michael Nordstrom and Alex
Pruss have contributed.  (A chap recently popped up on the Plucker dev
list considering an Android port.)

Plucker still gets daily use on my device.  About half of its purpose
in life is to be an ebook viewer, and there are about 4,500 volumes
occupying about 1.9GB on a 2GB SD card.  I have viewers for eReader.
Mobipocket, PDF and other formats, but by preference, I get HTML and
convert to Plucker.  Among other things, Plucker can read files
created with gzip compatible compression (using a Palm shared library
port of Zlib included with the viewer. (The default is Palm DOC
compatible compression.)  Using the high compression option produces
volumes reduced about 70% in size, compared to the 40% reduction
offered by the RLE compression DOC files use (and is the only reason I
haven't upgraded to bigger SD cards.)

> BTW, you can get e-books from www.gutenberg.org directly in plucker format.

I get the HTML and roll my own, since I've been doing this since
before PG offered the option.

You can also get books in Plucker format from Munseys (formerly
Blackmask) at http://www.munseys.com, and ManyBooks, at
http://manybooks.net.  Both offer an number of different ebook
formats, with Plucker among them.  Titles sourced from PG are the
mainstay, but each offers other things.  Munsey's proprietor is a fan
of pulp fiction, and has been scanning and converting stuff from the
'50's, like the works of Ed Lacy, a "hard boiled" novelist with an
assortment of works set in the world of boxing.  ManyBooks' proprietor
has a lot of stuff licensed under Creative Commons, and pushes his
site as a distribution point for folks doing CC licensed work that
want to reach a wider audience.

I get the HTML from them and roll my own as well.  The problem with
Plucker is the variety of options when you create the Plucker files:
Color or B/W, low, high, or no compression, images or not...  And
since websites do scripted conversions, it's hard to have a one size
fits all solution.  (I want high compression, color, and full size
images linked to a thumbnail.)  ManyBooks and Munseys generally
haven't included images in Plucker files, as they were struggling with
a good way to script the inclusion.

The Plucker desktop software that does the conversions is written in
Python and cross-platform, available for Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux.

> All=my=best, Paul
_____
Dennis


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