>>> Now... if I only had a palm-based pdf reader... =)
>>
>> Try this: start up Acrobat Reader and shrink the window to 160x160.
Then try
>> reading a handful of .pdf documents. That should give you an idea
what it would
>> be like to read them on a Palm device. Assuming you could even fit
all the .pdf
>> files you wanted on it.
>
> Actually, that's completely the wrong way to go about it. You aren't
>locked to 160x160 at all when reading documents. You can have vertical
and
>horizontal scrollbars as necessary, and render it "real time" and in
"true"
>format (1024x768, if need be).
The virtual area may be 1024 x 768 (or 816 x 1056 -- since that's 8.5 x 11
inches at 96 dpi), but the *visible* area is 160 x 160. Viewing a document this
way is very annoying -- which is what I was trying to get you to see with my
suggested excercise. Reading PDF files formatted for the desktop is just not
practical on a palmtop device.
>I have perl source here that makes PDF files on the fly, I
>just need to somehow get a perl interpretor for the palm to get it
into a
>testing phase, but from what Larry has mentioned publicly, PalmPerl is
not
>too far off.
You were asking for a PDF *reader* on the Palm. Having a PDF *writer* is a far
cry from a reader.
BTW, thanks for the tip on "PalmPerl". I was unaware that anyone was working on
such a project. Where did you hear about this? I searched for "PalmPerl" on
both google and deja, but they both turned up nothing.
>A 12-meg Microsoft Word document with images captured into the
document
>renders into about a 50k document when converted to PDF format. You be
the
>judge...
OK, then I judge you to be completely crazy. :-) There's no way you're getting
240X compression on your document. Something is getting stripped out, in which
case you're losing information in the conversion process.
I've got a 600K Word document that gets converted into a 500K PDF file. While
everyone's mileage may vary, I posit that my experience is more typical than
yours.
-- Keith Rollin
