> Also (thanks to David Wheeler for the notification) the Linux
> Documentation Project now provides all their HOWTO documents in Plucker
> format as well. You can find them at the following location under the
> Additional HOWTO Items:
I just located the original LDP news article:
http://ldp.upm.edu.ph/ldpwn/latest.html
or http://ldp.upm.edu.ph/ldpwn/ldpwn-2002-02-05.html
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Documents Available in Plucker Format
The Linux Documentation Project has just added support for another
documentation format: the "Plucker" format. Plucker is a GPL-licensed
offline HTML viewer for users of Palm-based PDAs (such as the Palm and
Handspring Visor series).
Plucker supports compression, hypertext links, clickable images, italics,
bold, varying-sized fonts, multiple databases, and configurable display
parameters and stylus options. Plucker also includes programs to compress
HTML documents into the Plucker format, essentially a compressed form of
HTML. This kind of compression is necessary on PDAs, which have limited
amounts of memory. More information, and the Plucker software, is available
at http://plkr.org.
Users of these PDAs can now download various LDP documents from the web,
push their base's "synchronize" button, and suddenly have those LDP
documents available on their PDAs wherever they are. This saves users from
having to install and use Plucker's compression programs (including figuring
out what options work best for the LDP). Opening a document on the PDA shows
that document's summary and a hypertext table of contents; users can use the
stylus to go immediately to the section they need, or read the whole
document if they wish. Once the documents are in one PDA, users can also
exchange them with other PDAs by "beaming" them (using infrared
connections).
Supporting plucker will hopefully encourage the use of GNU/Linux and free
software/open source software (FS/OSS), since by making it easier to put LDP
documents in PDAs, the documents should become more widespread. Hopefully
making "plucker" format available will also discourage the use of
proprietary formats for FS/OSS related documentation, which has already
happened in a few cases.
Thanks go to David A. Wheeler [EMAIL PROTECTED] for helping us out with
testing, and to our HOWTO Coordinator, Greg Ferguson, for doing the
implementation.
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