Another PM where I think the answer might benifit others
🙂
Originally posted by: RideFree
I now am the proud possessor of the Palm m500.
If there are any ?tips? that I may use to shortcut to the reading, please let me know.
I'm less interested in the learning curve than the result(s).
A couple of ??s
1. You mentioned fonts?What have you found the best for eBooks?
2. You also mentioned eReader for MS Word (I have Word 2003) ? how is it used?
3. What size xSD card do you recommend? (I have a 256 that I could use ? or get another).
4. Have you used iSilo? Is it worth the expense? It seems that it is the only way to get html files to go into the Palm. As an example, I D/L Dickens? Bleak House in html and could not use eReader (or anything else) to get the Bleak House html files to go into the palm. I?m about to experiment with iSilo.
Ok first, I prefer plain text for books on the palm. I dont read it in pdf, or html or anything but plain text. I dont like taking up the extra space for html readers and the larger file sizes for html documents. Thats my personal preference. I usually convert the txt into the normal pdb format that palm uses. Sometimes I'll compress it with ztxt but I haven't done that much since I upgraded from my old palm VII to the palm I'm using now, m500. It has enough space that usually the default compression of the PDB format is plenty and I dont run out of space especially with my 64 meg SD card. I keep the books on there until I need them, then I move the ones I'm reading currently to main memory so its faster access.
I use a program called TEXTIFY to adjust the text the way I like it, sometimes you get files with one carriage return per paragraph, per line, etc. So that program adjusts it.
Again this is all personal preference. Some people like to have pictures and stuff that HTML can allow, and the special formatting, etc and dont mind taking up the extra memory.
Fonts, well there's a bunch of them, so far I'm just using the default, its very much a matter of personal taste. I'm still experimenting with them.
What I did was install this font pack:
http://www.rainerzenz.de/palm/alphafonts.html
Then you can delete the ones you dont want and narrow it down to a few. You may or may not need another application to install/use the fonts with. I think it depends if you want to use the fonts in system applications or other programs that dont have options built in to choose a font. Weasel has built in options to change fonts so I dont need those other programs like X-Master and FontHack, although I did try them for a bit before deleting them. I also installed AAA fontviewer so I could view the fonts easily without needing the fonthack program.
As for converting there's a number of programs that do that. One of them is: TL-PDB
I'm not sure of the homepage but here is the link from google to d/l:
http://www.freewarepalm.com/utilities/tl-pdb.shtml
In the past I've sometimes just copied from word or from IE and pasted into notepad.
I've used a couple other converting programs in the past as well but I dont have the names handy right now.
I've used a couple reader programs. One is Weasel reader, thats the one I use now.
http://gutenpalm.sourceforge.net/
I used to also use this one, CSpotRun:
http://www.32768.com/bill/palmos/cspotrun/index.html
I haven't tried it but this is supposed to be a great ebook reader AND html reader for palm. Its free open source called Plucker:
http://www.plkr.org/
If you want to further explore options I came across this page on google, lists some reader programs:
http://manybooks.net/eBook_readers.php
Pretty much you just explore around on palm software sites and google and find software that does what you need and try it. I've managed to avoid purchasing any software for it, usually I go for the free alternatives.
My SD card is 64 megs, thats way more than I need just to store text ebooks on it. I have a dozen fiction books on it right now and its taking up less than 10 megs. Mainly I'm using that size since I got that one at a FAR sale at officemax
🙂
Here's what my basic steps I do to get books into palm.
1) I d/l a ebook I try to get them in text if I can, if not its usually html.
2) I use tl-pdb to convert from html into text file if its html.
3) Then when I have the text file, I use TEXTIFY to adjust it to how I want it. I usually put in maybe 2 spaces in front of each paragraph so I can tell when a new paragraph is when I'm reading.
4) Then I use the tl-pdb program again to save the file as the native palm PDB format (which is slightly compressed, I dont use the uber compression mode of PDB since its much slower accessing it on the palm).
5) Then I just run the palm desktop software and drag the PDB files into the quick install window, and hot sync. It uploads the PDB files.
6) Then the weasel reader detects them automatically on the palm when I run it, and I just click READ on the palm.
Once in a while I'll have a PDF file and I'll just copy paste that into notepad if I can to get it into a text format.
If you are running low on the 8 megs of main memory, you can use a program called JackFlash to move programs into the spare flash memory thats used for the OS, and free up some of the RAM. On my palm m500 there's almost 2 megs of flash memory free I can use to install programs to. Not everything works from flash, but the weasel reader I run does, and the zlib thingy I installed to read ztxt compressed docs goes in there. You can just try moving stuff to flash and see if it works. As well I can put books into there, but then I cant add bookmarks to them or anything. This program isn't free though
🙁 So if you are doing fine on memory, dont bother to get this program.
As for eReader, I dont think I mentioned that program... Perhaps someone else did?
iSilo, nope haven't used it.
Hope that helps!
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