CSpotRun

CSpotRun is a free reader for documents in the popular DOC format.

There are a couple of nice commercial readers on the market. CSpotRun is targeted at those of us who do not use a reader enough to justify spending the money on one. It was designed to be smaller and simpler than the commercial readers. As features have been added, it hasn't stayed all that small! But it is not too very big just yet.

The latest version of CSpotRun is available for download in either English, Spanish, or German. Notable older versions are available below.

I get a lot of email asking where to find DOC files on the Internet, how to make DOC files, how to get DOC files onto a PalmPilot, etc. Many people have answered these questions more thoroughly than I can. You should probably look at the help or FAQs at The Lending Library, MemoWare, or The PalmPilot Library.

CSpotRun Features

Selectable Fonts

Click the font buttons to change the font used to view the document.

Selectable Line Spacing

Click the linespacing buttons to change the line spacing used to view the document. The largest spacing is the standard line spacing. Smaller spacings let you fit a few more lines on the page.

Per-Document Preferences

Font and line spacing preferences are saved seperately for each document. To save you from having to reset all of your favorite setting, a document "inherits" the settings of the current document when you first open it.

Landscape Mode

I know that the screen is square! This makes reading long documents more comfortable for some users, especially those with smaller hands. You can also reverse the behavior of the page up and page down when the text is sideways.

Unlimited number of documents

The number of documents is limited by available memory, of course. But it is not arbitrarily imposed by CSpotRun as in some readers.

Jump to

Positions to jump to are in 10% increments. This is quicker than entering the exact percentage.

Full Screen View

The on-screen controls can be hidden by choosing "Toggle Controls" from the "Options" menu. (Even better, use menu shortcut T.)

Configurable User Interface

Choose "Controls..." from the "Options" menu. From this window, the user can choose exactly which controls appear on the screen. Note that it will not allow you to remove all controls from the screen. To do this use the "Toggle Controls" menu item. For convenience, each on-screen control has a corresponding menu item in the "Controls" menu. Use these menu items if the control you need is currently hidden.

The goofy name

My wife thought of it. It's sort of a pun. "See Spot Run" was a phrase from a beginning simple reading book from grade school. CSpotRun is a simple DOC reader. Get it? Thanks to those of you who have suggested alternate names. But, I think "CSpotRun" is going to stick. Plus it allows me to use the coolest icon ever.

Status of Your Favorite Missing Feature

Searching

Searching will be added soon!

Bookmarks

Everyone seems to want bookmarks. These will probably be added in some form. To scan for bookmarks, a search function should be implemented first.

Images, tags, hyperlinks, etc.

Don't hold your breath. These will likely never be added.

Renaming Documents

People have mentioned this. No one seems to feel too strongly about it though. So, I am not really considering it.

Categories, Heirarchial View of Related Documents, etc.

Users have suggested all sorts of possibilities for organizing many documents. Sounds neat, but more complicated than it is worth. For now, alphabetizing documents by name will suffice..

Auto Scroll

Automatic scrolling has been mentioned by a couple of people. Sort of useful, but there are several higher priorities.

Internationalization

I wouldn't mind doing this for additional languages, provided someone will translate strings for me.

Horizontal Scrolling

Only one person has requested this. If more people are interested, I will investigate the possibility. Low priority.

Beaming

Should make beaming work.

Flash

Evidently, CSpotRun behaves strangely when put in flash memory. Should look into this.

Compatibility

CSpotRun has been tested under OS2 and OS3. It does not work under OS1. I have spent some time on this. OS1 is missing several features which CSpotRun uses. To implement this functionality would require a lot of work and a lot of code. And it would be a larger program. So, I have chosen to stick with OS2 as baseline operating system.

Note to TealDoc users:Occasionally documents which a users has viewed with TealDoc are not shown in CSpotRun's document list. Fixing this is really easy; Start up TealDoc and choose "All to public format" from the "Doc" menu. (If you're interested, TealDoc changes the creator id of doc databases from "REAd" to "TIDc". So, CSpotRun and other document readers can no longer recognize the databases as DOC files.)

<a href="http://www.pobox.com/~wtc/palmos/cspotrun">
	<img border=0 vspace=15 hspace=15 
		src="getcspotrun.gif" alt="Get CSpotRun!">
</a>
			

0.0 Sept 13, 1998

Initial version

0.1 Sept 14, 1998

Minor fix. Added processing of carraige returns in addition to newlines. (Thanks to Randy Hartley for pointing out the need for this.)

0.2 Sept 15, 1998

Minor fix. The last character of some documents was not displayed. Fixed this. (Thanks to Rob Sherrard for discovering this bug!) Cleaned up some code, shrinking the .PRC a bit. This is a nice, small (8k) version. You can download this version as a zip archive.

0.3 Sept 19, 1998

Added the configurable user interface and full screen view. Also added the Palm III's large bold font. It's very readable. (Thanks to Stephen Millman for this suggestion!)

0.4 Oct 5, 1998

Big changes. Added screen rotating. Made display of line from previous page on page up/down optional. Added options for tapping the screen to move a line, half-page, or page. Fixed bug which made first line of page sometime start in mid-line. (Thanks for John Verne for pointing this out.) Wrote some help. Reworked menus and dialogs to be prettier. Made a document "inherit" the current documents settings when you open it for the first time. (Thanks to Frank Fejes for some great constructive pickyness!) Alphabetized document list. Laid groundwork for easier internationalization of strings.

0.5 Oct 8, 1998

There is now a German version! Many thanks to Arne Nickel for the translation. Internationalization required a few minor GUI tweaks even in the English version. Fixed some very strange behavior found by Izya Yagolnitser when reading a certain document. (In case you're interested, it seems that in QED-generated documents, record lengths don't match the record length specified in the header.) Also sped up the text drawing code just a tiny bit.

0.5.1 Oct 12, 1998

Minor fix. Added a missing German translation. Fixed bug causing a crash when a document is replaced with a shorter one having the same name. Silly oversight. Thanks to Jonathan Markevich for bringing this to my attention.

0.5.2 Oct 18, 1998

Added Spanish translation. Many thanks to Marcelo Rinesi for this translation! Also fixed incompatibility with "jwolcal2.pbd". (This looks like a bug in the compression program used on this document.) Thanks to Louis Lauzon for reporting this, and for being patient with my taking way too long to fix it. This is the most recent version. You can download the English, Spanish, or German edition.

Source Code

The source code is not currently available. It likely will be made available if and when I decide to stop developing CSpotRun myself. (And yes, I am familiar with the Free Software Foundation and the GPL.) There are many sources of sample PalmOS programs. RoadCoders would be a great place to start looking.