Comments on: Quickies: Screen Repairs, Fonts, Plucker

For now I am content with my Palm default font. Well, just for curiosity purposes, I might as well ask where one can obtain these free "Alpha" fonts?

1) You don;t have this MONSTER viewer file to install

2) It will scarf down almost ANY webpage

3) Compresses documents using ZLib (builtin) so documents are actually smaller than Avantgo

I use it in conjunction with sitescooper (more open source! Yay!) and I have a batch file on my Windows box
that is scheduled to run everyday at 0600 and 1800 (6am and 6pm) that automatically downloads all my newsfeeds and throws them into the Install directory so that all I have to do is sync my m505 and I have all my news there. All free. And since Plucker for Windows installs components into your right-click menu, if you have a .txt or .htm(l) file stored on your local machine, you can right click on it, select "Convert to Plucker" and it will create a Plucker .pdb file that you can hotsync to carry the content with you. I have been using it for years to store docs on my various handhelds (PalmIII, Vx, m505).
Once I get my Zaurus, I will probably try to compile a viewer for that too. Great little program. Of course, you can't go online with it and use it as a browser, but there are many more apps out there that do it better.
NOTE: Plucker only reads Plucker-formatted docs. Not DOC standard files or iSilo-formatted files. Although since it is all open source, someone COULD throw those capabilities in there. There is even a online PDF to Plucker formatter on their website somewhere....

David A. McLemore

What I like about Plucker is that it uses your own PC as server, so while it's slower than AvantGo, you don't have to worry that it will ever become a paysite like Mazingo for Pocket PC.

Avantgo: For people new to offline web browsing on the PalmOS. Easy to use. Gotta use THEIR sitelist though (last time I looked, years ago)

iSilo: For Avantgo users who tire of Avantgo...and want a nice easy desktop app (shareware). And want MORE choice over what sites to download.

Plucker: For the hardcore user. Command line driven, but desktop is being worked on. Considered beta, but I have had no problems.

Once again, try 'em all, pick the one that suits you best.

Plucker 1.2 has NOT BEEN RELEASED so please don't consider it as such. It is a BETA, and is there for the purposes of testing. There have been new releases and code committed to the cvs almost daily, even if the website hasn't been updated.

There's a new website being redesigned, as well as a bunch of other tools to use for this new revision of Plucker. Nobody on the team is "dormant", and in fact, we've been cranking hard at code and bug fixes and new features. Are you not on the mailing lists?

http://www.clinicalexam.com/pluckerdesktop/downloads/

If you install under Windows, Plucker adds a Convert to Plucker choice to the context menu for text files and HTML documents. Select that choice, and the Plucker parser will convert the text file of HTML document to a Plucker format PDB file in the same directory, which you can hotsync to your PDA using whatever tools you normally use. (I like PInstall for that.)

My big use of Plucker is as a reference tool. I'm a SysAdmin for a living, and most of the documentation for systems I deal with is available in HTML format. I use Plucker to create PDA versions, and carry the equivalent of about ten karge paper manuals around in my pocket, with full search capability. (Among other things, the complete set of Linux HOW-TOs is available in Plucker format.) The Plucker docs live happily on my expansion module, saving precious RAM. At this point, my Visor Pro is largely a Plucker engine.

One correction to an earlier comment here by mclemored however: Plucker does not require Perl. The Plucker parser is written in Python, another free, open source language, and the full Windows installer includes a version of Python, so you don't need it already installed. Sitescooper _does_ require perl.

The increased compression from Zlib is also a boon, but that is provided by sysZlib, yet another open source product. Zlib uses the same compression algorithm as the gzip utility from Unix. If you normally use Zlib compression on your Plucker documents, you'll need to beam sysZlib _and_ Plucker to folks who you would like to share Plucker files with.

______
Dennis

David A. McLemore