One of the neatest ideas for a use for a palmtop computer is as an Electronic Book reader. Project Gutenburg has been responsible for producing plain text versions of a huge number of classic books that are no longer in copyright. Most of these are in ASCII format, and are available on various Web sites and CD-ROMs. Barry Childress produced a Shareware reader for the S3a which rapidly became one of my favourite applications, allowing me to read books in odd moments on trains, planes, in boring meetings, etc. As disc space is at a premium on a Series 3a or 3c, Reader deals with the raw text or with a special compressed format. Whilst PC owners were provided with a DOS compressor to squash text files to something like half their original size, there was nothing to do this under RISC OS until Tony van der Hoff (the author of KeyMod) stepped in to produce a Shareware compressor for RISC OS. Called TCReader, it only costs £5 to register, and does a brilliant job of turning text files into the TCR format used by Reader.
Why am I telling you this now? Well I suppose most people who've
been keeping an eye on various Psion-related Web sites know that Jean-Luc
Damnet has produced a Series 5 version called
VReader5. Judging by the large mailing list of beta
testers that he had, lots of folk have tried it before it was released and
are getting into the habit of "readering" Electronic Books once more.
If you've got a RISC OS computer and a copy of Reader or
VReader5, then TCReader is just what you need to give you back
some disc space while you read "The Woman in White", the 200 kb
manual of a software package, or any other text document.
Download it, try it out, and if you like it, please register
it with Tony.
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