Comments on: WordSmith Adds FineType for Monochrome Handhelds

The monochrome high res/anti-aliasing may sound like a good idea, but to me on my S320, it just makes the documents look blurry. Still a great product and it's nice that they let us see what it looks like on monochrome PDAs, but I wonder how many people will really use this feature.

Blurry on my Palm Vx. Here's my solution: Use FontHack with a nice replacement font. Set it so that for ALL applications, it remaps some typically unused font (like Large) NOT the standard font. Then go into your application and select the large font. Voila! Your new font is accessible. Ok, I don't use WordSmith, I use QuickWord, so I don't know if this will work with WordSmith, but it works GREAT!

I'll take crisp, high-contrast mono fonts over blurry anti-aliased ones ANY day!

Don't use the high res option. Use only the FineType font option. With high res selected I agree it is very blurry. I am using an m500.

I too have an M500 and I agree that all that the HighRes option does is to make the text look blurry. But leave the Palm in the cradle and step about three feet away, and you can see how smooth the text does truly look. I'm guessing here, but the HiRes option is probably intended for the Handera QVGA and the high resolution Sony monochrome screen. It's looks like a font smoothing technology.

While you are right that Tahoma does look a little better, I still don't see that this is that great of an idea. I can't even see how it would look that great with even a color screen. There just isn't enough pixels in a 160x160 screen to work effectively. The gray pixels don't seem to be in the right spots around the characters to work effectively. They do more to blur than anti-alias. The gray pixels should fill in more on angles and curves than along straight portions of a letter like they do on bold formatted characters. In italic characters black pixels that are important for keeping things crisp are altogether replaced by gray ones making the character washed out.

It's too bad because I was dying to see this technology work on the 160x160 screen (especially my old IIIxe). Now I don't see how this can be at all useful for standard size text. Oh well, thanks for the innovation anyhow BlueNomad! It's at least an effort - more than I can say for most of Palm's innovations these days.

It is 2.01. BlueNomad just sent an email to customers. Here is the first paragraph:
Dear WordSmith Customer,
We are happy to announce the release of WordSmith version 2.01! 2.01 includes several new features and enhancements.

Here is their url: http://www.bluenomad.com/ws/prod_wordsmith_download.html

Thanks, Altema!

Sure, I'd love to check out the fonts. Can I just install them using the usual "Install Handheld files" app? If you can, email them to me at:

axis_guy@hotmail.com

Thanks again. I'm excited to check them out ;-)

They're on the way. You can use the usual "Install Handheld files" app.

On the way!

We were promised it in SOME upcoming release. I imagine that it was a quick and easy upgrade to provide finetype to mono units (really, an oversight in 2.0), but rest assured, they're busily coding away at VFS.

With WordSmith, not only can you read docs but you can edit and rewrite them. My daughter was pleasantly suprised when reading a children's story on her Palm. I had replaced all the occurances of the main character's name with her name.

Also check out the reflow option. This capability has made many of docs easier to read by getting rid of all those extra line breaks.

So...
WordSmith is quickly becoming my reader of choice. DeepReader isn't even on my list.

It has autoscroll. In View mode, click on the little icon that looks like a pair of eyeglasses.

If you want to reorient your screen, I suggest FlipHack.