Docs To Go v8 Released with Native PDF Support
DataViz announced today the release of Documents To Go Premium Edition version 8. This latest version of the Premium Edition adds native PDF support, providing an image-rich, WYSIWYG-view of product brochures, manuals, annual reports and other common Adobe PDF files and attachments without requiring any desktop conversion.
"With this newest generation of Palm OS-based devices that are wirelessly-enabled like the Treo 650 smartphone and TX handheld, support for native PDF files has consistently ranked as the top feature request from our customers, "said Danny Tu, Product Manager, DataViz, Inc. "Adding native PDF file support to Documents To Go Premium Edition 8 creates a compelling upgrade offer for our customers so we are very excited to deliver this solution to the market."
Native PDF technology includes support for embedded graphics, tables, multiple zoom levels, page layout and word wrap views to provide a desktop-quality view of PDF files on Treo smartphones and other popular Palm OS-based devices. In addition, pre-processing of files is not required on the desktop before the file can be viewed on the mobile device. For instance, customers who receive PDF files as e-mail attachments can easily view them right on their mobile device.
“DataViz continues to develop innovative applications that are optimized for Palm OS and designed to give customers the office solutions they need to be productive when on the road,” said Lisa Rathjens, director of developer marketing for PalmSource. “A native PDF solution that doesn’t require interaction with a desktop computer is a must-have in today's wireless world.”
Pricing and Availability
Documents To Go Premium Edition retails for $49.99 and is available directly from DataViz, as well as many retail and online stores including Office Depot, Franklin Covey, Amazon.com and Handango.com. Upgrade pricing of $29.99 is available directly from DataViz for all previous Documents To Go customers, including those who received Documents To Go as bundled software with Palm, Sony, or AlphaSmart handhelds.
About Document To Go Premium Edition
Documents To Go Premium Edition for Palm OS is an award-winning mobile Office suite that allows users to open, view, edit and create native Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on a Palm OS handheld or smartphone. The Premium Edition also includes support for native Adobe PDF files, spell checking in word processing documents, Excel-like charting, pictures and password-protected files. Documents To Go Premium Edition is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese.
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RE: DV Hits the Mother Lode
In the Spirit of Umoja,
Ronin
RE: DV Hits the Mother Lode
Check out http://www.palmsolo.com for the ramblings of a PDA addict.
RE: DV Hits the Mother Lode
Looks to me like the only difference between version 7 and version 8 is the native PDF support. In fact, I do not see any information on the Dataviz site regarding any other new features.
/QUOTE*
That's the only diff betw v7 and v8 PREMIUM Edition. If you upgrade versions but just between the Standard Edition... it doesn't look like you're getting anything at all, if not anything significant
"Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake? Anyone can make an error, but that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
-Grand Admiral Thrawn
the secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that's even worse
My PDAs: Visor --> Visor Neo (blue) --> Zire 71 --> Tungsten T3 (with 4 of 6 screws still remaining) ~?~> zodiac 2?
T|X already outdated
RE: T|X already outdated
Anyway, with 114 MB of RAM on the TX, do you really HAVE to remove the version in RAM? ;-)
RE: T|X already outdated
RE: T|X already outdated
this has not been a issue with past versions of DocsToGo.
In the Spirit of Umoja,
Ronin
RE: T|X already outdated
They should at least offer TX purchasers an additional discount to DTG 8 seeing as how a measly 4 weeks caused the TX to miss out on DTG8...
Still, all that aside, this is the most compelling DTG upgrade since they added 320*480 support two years ago.
I never had any problems with DTG 7 being on my Palm on top of version 6. The RAM version is always the "default". Same with RealPlayer etc.
Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5
RE: T|X already outdated
It doesn't matter if the DTG8 came out a little later
How much do you want to bet Dataviz INTENTIONALLY dragged their feet on the new DTG's release date just so they could get out of shipping it with the TX?
They should at least offer TX purchasers an additional discount to DTG 8 seeing as how a measly 4 weeks caused the TX to miss out on DTG8...
*/quote
Makes no difference whatsoever. Read it and weep....
http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/index_palm.html
this link shows that only DTG v8 PREMIUM edition has PDF To Go. Standard and Professional edition do *NOT* include PDF functionality
http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/dxtg_hhbundle.html?redirect=dxtg_users_palm_sony
........... while this link shows that in the past, DTG was almost always bundled with just Professional edition. Again, NOT Premium edition where PDF To Go is at.
Sadly enough, I believe $29.99 IS the "special upgrade price for T|X users. Same as other users who had DTG bundled with their handhelds :(
.
*QUOTE
The T|X has just 100 MB user avalaible RAM. DocsToGo can easily go up to 5 MB. It is too much wasted space ;) Didn't the T|X decompress the ROM in Flash RAM? Couldn't that be edited? I feel bad having an outdated version of a program in RAM ...
*/quote
It goes both ways. I personally left DTG 6.002 in my T|T3 ROM, and just installed DTG v7.003 in RAM. Voiding warranty ain't a concern for me, but it's still too technical for me to use JackSprat/FLash for that. However, it does have it's uses.... the least of which is to save space on 64MB+ pOS PDAs. Big reason would be if you have to hard reset your device, you'd have the latest version of all the ROM apps in ROM. Saves space on SD cards since you won't need to back those apps now.
RE: T|X already outdated
Welcome to the world of technology!
Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com
New Features?
RE: New Features?
-DatavizTech has updated as well and it saves more space. My UX with DocsToGo 7 had 6MB free. Now it has 9MB free. This is amazing
-The PicsToGo has sped up tremendously.
-I'm noticing is a real speed improvement on my TH55. It scans the card much faster, and loads and exits native excel documents much faster
-I've never had a problem adjusting column width with Native Excel or Sheet To Go docs, except that the "Fit" function never seemed to work correctly before. Fit seems to have been fixed with version 8 {works correctly but doesn't save}
-Also, Dataviz finally worked their Dataviz Tech tool right into Docs2Go. You can now move all of Docs2Go to and from external memory from within Docs2Go.
RE: New Features?
Too bad you lost that 3 MB document in the upgrade. Check your math, Bubba.
------------------------
Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------
The Palm eCONomy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
NetFrontLinux - the next major cellphone OS?: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=8060#111823
RE: New Features?
??
he said DTG7 had 6MB free
now (DTG8) has 9MB free
the higher the free RAM, the better. What exactly is this 'document' you're referring to?
"Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake? Anyone can make an error, but that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
-Grand Admiral Thrawn
the secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that's even worse
My PDAs: Visor --> Visor Neo (blue) --> Zire 71 --> Tungsten T3 (with 4 of 6 screws still remaining) ~?~> zodiac 2?
Forget new features
RE: Forget new features
RE: Forget new features
That's good to hear @ stability. Mt v6 on T3, is just about at the point where I have deemed it useless because of file corruption, resets and even hard resets. I have recently stopped storing my docs on the SD and instead use internal memory, and after about 2 months I have had no issues.
But after about 3 hard resets due to D2G crashes during a file save, I've become a little skittish even using it. Good to hear they have gotten serious about stability. Hopefully v8 is nothing but stability improvements to make it rock solid. Corrupting a vital doc or hard-resetting on the road is scary. Not to mention that D2G does NOT restore docs to previous state properly after hard reset, requiring considerable work to restore the desktop->PDA.
Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com
RE: Forget new features
However, while it does appear to be ridiculously easy to corrupt the preferences db in version 7, I do think that it is overall more stable than version 6 as problems with opening and working in docs are rare.
In the Spirit of Umoja,
Ronin
RE: Forget new features
Wowsers. I have certainly had my share of stability issues with certain apps on the T3 - but the DTG 6.02 on my T3 has always wokred flawlessly and keep all files on my SD. I wonder what the difference is?
RE: Forget new features
My 1GB SD has no problems anywhere, so I don't thinks that's it?
Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com
RE: Forget new features
Can somebody try and load the DateBk5 manual and see if it can handle that monster? I figure if it can handle that without crashing it can handle just about any PDF.
In the Spirit of Umoja,
Ronin
PDF? That's it?
that's it for now it seems
Otherwise, we may end up with an 'Agendus'. Have bleeding edge features but stability/reliablity problems for the most of us who would use said app.
"Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake? Anyone can make an error, but that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
-Grand Admiral Thrawn
the secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that's even worse
My PDAs: Visor --> Visor Neo (blue) --> Zire 71 --> Tungsten T3 (with 4 of 6 screws still remaining) ~?~> zodiac 2?
RE: PDF? That's it?
Palm & Dataviz--Corporate siblings if I ever saw any!
Really, I'd been coughing up $ for new DTG updates since version 5.x. I really am not seeing the rapid advancements & improvements I saw in earlier revisions and DTG 7 is now trying a Real-style takeover of many file associations (bitmaps, jpegs etc).
As nice as PDF support would be I'm not going to pony up for this one. I'll wait and see what Palm comes up with for spring '06 (if I haven't thrown in the towel by that point) and hopefully it'll have DTG 8 pre-installed.
Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5
Don't count on PDF To Go being bundled..... EVER
this link shows that only DTG v8 PREMIUM edition has PDF To Go. Standard and Professional edition do *NOT* include PDF functionality
http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/dxtg_hhbundle.html?redirect=dxtg_users_palm_sony
........... while this link shows that in the past, DTG was almost always bundled with just Professional edition. Again, NOT Premium edition where PDF To Go is at.
RE: PDF? That's it?
It's going to do ALL of them in
I just used a crusty 7 year old Toshiba Tecra laptop that someone brought by the other day. Ancient as it was, it was running a recent version of Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.x on it. It's a FREE download.
To limit the only usable PDF viewer on Palms to the pricey Premium version of DTG that offers NO other real enhancements just smacks of the "make a few $ now to forsake the future" quickbuck mentality that's prevading (and dooming) the PalmCONomy.
Come on, Dataviz, kill DTG Standard and reduce the prices by $10-$15 on the two Pro/Prem versions. 3 variants of a single app that has hardly changed in 3 years is a bit much, don't you think?
Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5
RE: PDF? That's it?
On the flip side, $40 would even be quite alot for PP, but that of course is theoretical since Pro ed. comes only bundled with handhelds and not available for seperate purchase. I really do wish DV would just sell them seperately in addition to offering them as one big package cheaply. $50 ain't bad if you use Word, Excel, PP, txt, PDF, charting, spellcheck, fonts, and password protection. Else it's anoying to pay that much just for PowerPoint and/or PDF is quite alot of $$ too.
On the flip flip side.... Office for PC costs $250+, so this ain't exactly a new annoyance for consumers.
hkklife + CLIE TH55 = no more complaints? ;-O
Your new TH55 already comes with an excellent PDF viewer: Picsel Viewer. Enjoy.
;-O
TVoR
------------------------
Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------
The Palm eCONomy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
NetFrontLinux - the next major cellphone OS?: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=8060#111823
RE: PDF? That's it?
But where, oh where, to find an affordable Euro TH55 in good condition?
And for the record, I am SURE I could find SOMETHING to complain about ;-) on the TH55. Toothpick stylus, slow CPU, and weak hard buttons.
Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5
NO excuses, hkklife!
But where, oh where, to find an affordable Euro TH55 in good condition?
Affordable + Euro TH55 + good condition unfortunately will not occur in the same sentence. Pick any two, but don't expect all three unless you know the seller!
eBay is the only place I see TH55 these days and checking today there haven't been any with Bluetooth available in the past few weeks. You can find a TH55 without Wi-Fi for around $200 - $250. As always, be careful on eBay...
I thought I was being sodomized when I bought mine from a local importer/extortionist, but all things considered, the price was actually reasonable given how rare new Euro TH55 were at the time. Now they're pretty much impossible to find new, but if you look hard enough you might find a good used one. Good luck.
And for the record, I am SURE I could find SOMETHING to complain about ;-) on the TH55. Toothpick stylus, slow CPU, and weak hard buttons.
I tend to mainly use the cap of a ballpoint pen or my finger for input, so I don't really care about the stylus. The CPU is plenty fast for real world use, but I suppose if you use your PDA mainly for games it might be slow on really big games. The dedicated multimedia chips take the load off the CPU where it matters most. And the buttons are only an issue if you're a gamer.
Any way you slice it the Euro TH55 will be remembered as the best traditional form factor PalmOS PDA and will probably have a cult following like the Apple Newton. I'll eBay one of mine for $2000 next year. ;-O
TVoR
------------------------
Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------
The Palm eCONomy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
NetFrontLinux - the next major cellphone OS?: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=8060#111823
DTG 8 can't open many pdf files
preventing the file from being modified, then it wont open the file at all. Here's the error message:
>Documents To Go cannot open this file because there is a Document >Security set which restricts what can be done to the document. To >learn how to change the Document Security please visit >www.dataviz.com/pdfencrypt
But, these files are not encrypted an can easily be read with acrobat, preview [mac], and xpdf [unix].
The advice given by DataViz is to use Adobe Acrobat Professional
on your desktop to remove the setting.
If PDF viewing is important to you, wait for an update.
RE: DTG 8 can't open many pdf files
Nice find Hunterhawk. Check back if you find out more about it.
Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com
RE: DTG 8 can't open many pdf files
I can't open any pdf, big or small. Not enough memory!!
I have 11475416 bytes of free RAM.
What does DTG8 want to open a 29K pdf?
Thanks
RE: DTG 8 can't open many pdf files
There are several serious issues:
1. As noted above, if the do not modify bit is set on a pdf file it won't open at all. The point of this security setting is to prevent you from modifying someone else's pdf file, not to prevent you from reading it. These types of files are quite common (about 20% of the randomly selected pdf science papers I tested and some local subway maps...) so this is a serious issue. Dataviz's recommended workaround is to load the file in Acrobat Professional and remove the security settings. This is a virtually useless recommendation since removing security settings requires knowing the password used to set them, which is generally not possible if you didn't create the file in the first place...
2. Serious rendering problems. As far as I can tell, this program is unable to extract or use any embedded fonts in the pdf file and seems to just replace them with some standard set of fonts. At best this causes inter-character and inter-word spacing to look a little funky. But for anything other than a fairly simple text document, there are more serious issues. I read lots of science papers in pdf format, which is the format used by all journals I've encountered. In these types of documents it's common to have superscript and subscript formatting as well as non-english symbols such as greek characters or mathematical symbols. Greek symbols, for instance, depending on how the document was created, may be part of a symbol font or an extended character in a unicode font. The result in the DTG 8 reader is either a missing character or the character replaced by something else (such as a rectangle). The superscript/subscript characters are poorly spaced and sometimes overlap regular text and even italicised words are often replaced with an un-italiced font. While bitmap based figures look fine, any figure using text will look wrong since the formatting and spacing of the text won't match the original. It's all pretty ugly.
Less significant issues:
3. You might think using UDMH with this is a good idea. It makes it crash. (However, other programs crash when UDMH is active so I can't fault Dataviz for that. If you add it as an exclusion in UDMH it does seem to be pretty stable, at least on my T5.)
4. Hyperlinks show up as blue but don't work.
5. Navigation seems a bit clunky. The 5 way navigator and selection buttons on the T5 are a little unpredictable. In some cases they will scroll a zoomed page but in others will navigate the toolbar. There's a full screen mode that gets rid of the title bar and the toolbar but there's no way to change the zoom level or the page in the full screen view so you have to constantly switch back and forth. There's no way to get rid of the title bar, which is useless, while keeping the toolbar visible. Zooming is limited to specific values. You can't zoom in on a marque.
6. Fairly slow.
Most of these issues are tolerable except the first 2 which limit the usefulness of this program to fairly simple pdf files.
I also take issue with Dataviz's claim that this is the "first and only" native pdf viewer for the Palm. Picsel Viewer/Browser has been around and loved for a long time. Sadly, only available for the now defunct Clie line. I've tried to get a hacked version to run on my T5 but haven't been able to get it to work. Always get a crash when loading it. If anyone has been able to get it to work on a T5, please let me know how!
There's also PalmPDF. This is still in alpha and is basically unusable on my T5 since it always crashes, even with UDMH. However, assuming the stability issues can be fixed, it looks much more promising than DTG 8's version. It doesn't suffer from the first 2 problems listed above. It does have problems with some pdf files where there are many graphic objects. But most of the pdfs I've tried with it render correctly.
___________
I've got the whole world in my Palm. But the slider's stuck shut.
RE: DTG 8 can't open many pdf files
to a certain degree, what you are describing is a "feature" more than a bug. Font substitution can, and should happen. Yes, it is annoying, especially for technical docs. On a handhelp with limited font storage, this will happen more often since there is less room for font storage. It has been a while since I looked at the spec, but I believe that fonts can be embedded into PDF, much like with a postcript file, but the creator has to decide to do this. If the creator assumes that the reader will have the font already, e.g. it is one of the standard 35 ps fonts [symbols is one of these], then they wont embed it to reduce the size of the created file.
Since I can't open any of my techical files :-(, I haven't been motivated to look into converting type 1 and TTF into a format that DTG could use. I know a lot about fonts, but not as much about fonts on the palm in particular.
regarding "6. Fairly slow." I think it is not too bad.
If I can get my hands on a nokia 770, I'll suddenly care a lot less about this issue. At 480x320, viewing pdf files is going to be painful no matter what. Mostly, I want to carry some large references around on my Lifedrive, but I don't plan on spending a lot of time reading them on such a small screen.
This release is broken - it should be fixed.
RE: DTG 8 can't open many pdf files
I was playing briefly with a hacked Picsel Viewer. I haven't gotten to work quite right yet, but from what I was able to see it seems to have good rendering and is much faster. It's a shame they won't sell a standalone version and Palm won't licence it for their pdas...
___________
I've got the whole world in my Palm. But the slider's stuck shut.
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DV Hits the Mother Lode
Now, what gets me about DV is their upgrade path. They haven't made it to a vX.1 release since v3 or 4 I think. A 12 month upgrade schedule keeps that cash flowing over there. Without PDF, would their be any compelling reason to upgrade from v7?
Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com