reading russian books on the palm – check
April 23rd, 2005 at 3:42 pmAfter some grief yesterday, I finally managed to get my Palm to show me Russian books in a good reader.
I’m so new to this world of Palm, that I don’t know many basic concepts – for example how to upload arbitrary files to the memory, how programs recognize them, etc.
Anyhow, the trio that made it work for me is:
- CyrHack V – a full Cyrillic font-set
- WinMakezText – a converter from various document formats (text, html, rtf, etc) to a .pdb that PalmFiction understands.
- PalmFiction – a terrific, feature-full GPLed reader for many file formats.
It’s interesting to note that all of these programs were written by Russian folk and have a Russian interface (PalmFiction also has English). When book-reading is involved, Russian is a good language to know 
Needless to say that I can read books in English and Spanish with PalmFiction as well, those just don’t need the special font-set.
Once I purchase an expansion card, I’ll be able to place documents on it directly without translation – PalmFiction then knows how to read them. In the Palm’s internal memory, I must have files converted to .pdb
One thing WinMakezText does is reformat the text files to be more convenient for the Palm screen. I have a Perl script that does it for printing, so I might take on adjusting it for the Palm as well.
There’s also a Palm::Doc set of modules for manipulating native Palm documents. Fun fun fun.
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