Most efficient ebook format and fastest reader?

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc (More info?)

On the palm it would be easy and one would be spoiled for excellent
open source choices; there's plucker, there's ztxt (compressed text)
and there are weasel reader and tibr pro, and so on.

What choices are there for pocketpc other than the inefficient repligo,
pdf and MS reader? I want ones equivalent to the above.

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc (More info?)

"casioculture" <casioculture@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1115685027.335349.27050@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>
> On the palm it would be easy and one would be spoiled for excellent
> open source choices; there's plucker, there's ztxt (compressed text)
> and there are weasel reader and tibr pro, and so on.
>
> What choices are there for pocketpc other than the inefficient repligo,
> pdf and MS reader? I want ones equivalent to the above.
>

The most efficient I would probably say was Tome Raider. I have a 600 meg
encyclopedia in TR3 format (wikkipedia, complete thing minus pictures as of
earlier this year), and it handles it wonderfully. I also have a 70,000+
recipe TR3 file I built and it works very well indeed. The end TR3 file is
compressed, explaining the smaller file sizes. This is my most used
application on the PPC.

As for general text reading (enjoyment) MobiBook works well for me, but it
will not handle the sheer volume that Tome Raider manages.

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc (More info?)

Thanks, the closest I could think of was tomb raider -
but I knew that wasn't it.. ;-}

xfiler


>-----Original Message-----
>Tome Raider. Shame about the marketing of them at times.
>
>"xfiler" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message
>news:1f1c01c5556d$cee30d70$a601280a@phx.gbl...
>> Don't remember the website rightnow, but there is
>> Mobireader, and I think tomereader (not sure on the
>> spelling on that one.) Search Google for "PPC E-book
>> readers", or look on the various handheld websites,
there
>> are others to choose from. I would start at either:
>> www.pocketpcmag.com, or www.pocketpcfreewares.com.
Also
>> you could try www.handango.com
>>
>> xfiler
>>
>>
>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>
>>>On the palm it would be easy and one would be spoiled
>> for excellent
>>>open source choices; there's plucker, there's ztxt
>> (compressed text)
>>>and there are weasel reader and tibr pro, and so on.
>>>
>>>What choices are there for pocketpc other than the
>> inefficient repligo,
>>>pdf and MS reader? I want ones equivalent to the above.
>>>
>>>.
>>>
>
>
>.
>

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc (More info?)

xTenn wrote:
> "casioculture" <casioculture@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1115685027.335349.27050@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> >
> > On the palm it would be easy and one would be spoiled for excellent
> > open source choices; there's plucker, there's ztxt (compressed
text)
> > and there are weasel reader and tibr pro, and so on.
> >
> > What choices are there for pocketpc other than the inefficient
repligo,
> > pdf and MS reader? I want ones equivalent to the above.
> >
>
> The most efficient I would probably say was Tome Raider. I have a
600 meg
> encyclopedia in TR3 format (wikkipedia, complete thing minus pictures
as of
> earlier this year), and it handles it wonderfully. I also have a
70,000+
> recipe TR3 file I built and it works very well indeed. The end TR3
file is
> compressed, explaining the smaller file sizes. This is my most used
> application on the PPC.
>
> As for general text reading (enjoyment) MobiBook works well for me,
but it
> will not handle the sheer volume that Tome Raider manages.


Okay I got excited about tomeraider, but converting my PDF's to it
turned out to be a major pain in the butt. It seems that I need to
author tr3 files manually. Is there a tool to convert from PDF to TR3?
or even from HTML to TR3? is there an alternative app to tomeraider
with a one-click conversion?

Oooh how I miss Plucker from palmOS. It converted a 24mb PDF file to
~4mb WITH pictures, repligo did it in ~19mb.

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc (More info?)

"casioculture" <casioculture@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1115685027.335349.27050@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>
> On the palm it would be easy and one would be spoiled for excellent
> open source choices; there's plucker, there's ztxt (compressed text)
> and there are weasel reader and tibr pro, and so on.
>
> What choices are there for pocketpc other than the inefficient repligo,
> pdf and MS reader? I want ones equivalent to the above.
>

Try:
Isilo - not only great website grabber (like Plucker?) but reads
*.pdb
Mobibook - also for *.pdb
Tome Raider - efficiently stores/reads massive data (dictionaries,
encyclopedia, etc)

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc (More info?)

"casioculture" <casioculture@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1115918540.059193.174890@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
>
> Hello, thanks a lot for the reply. I did use another tool which is the
> open source pdftohtml, http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/. The problems
> I had were 1) file import in the tomeraiders 3 will only list files
> with the *.txt or *.tr2 extensions, and 2) even when I manually changed
> the .html file extension to .txt, the file import in tomeraider 3
> objected to characters and tags such as ! and doctype and gave me
> errors. What is it that I'm not doing right?
>


Well, you are not doing anything wrong. The html tags supported by the
import are basically a subset of true html, and the pdf-html generator tool
must be writing fairly nice HTML. And yes you need to rename it to .txt to
have it load correctly. In the installation there is a doc that has more
detail, but the gist of it is that.

At this point I would probably suggest using something like OpenOffice to
convert the HTML to text and trying it again. But if you have a lot of
formatting in the HTML (from the PDF) you may be a bit disappointed in the
end result.

The second option is to write a quick script to rip out the offending tags.
This is atttractive because you keep all the image tags in place, if there
are any. Once you have the script you can quickly fix all your files in a
three step process (pdf-html-strippedhtml-tr3), but it will take some trial
and error to have them working correctly. On top of that if the pdfs are
smaller by nature you would need to combine them into one large file in
order to have searching optimized. If you do use images be sure you are
using at least 3.12.

The last thing to note is that TR's strength is in massive amounts of data,
not so much in pretty pages until they improve their import process and
better image handling. For general purpose a simpler reader may be the best
alternative (mobibook, for example). But once you get the process working
you might be surprised at the tons of data you can have at your fingertips.


Hope that helps, but it looks like you have issues to work out, sorry to
say.

BTW, if you were curious about Wikipedia and TR check out here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TomeRaider
http://download.wikimedia.org/tomeraider/current_tr3/ (The 517 meg file is
pretty sweet, if you have the room. I am running a different (newer) dump,
but this one is still darn current for a general purpose encyclopedia.).


Good Luck