[dean_shan]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

http://www.handebooks.com/howto/peanut.html

Free ebook converter for Word - I've never used it. I have the $30 publisher. You can also do it manually since it is just a markup language, but takes a bit of getting used to.

I use the palm markup. It's not that bad. I've made a couple of books with it. You can get it here. I use the dropbook because I'm too cheap to buy the publisher.

[dean_shan]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

http://www.handebooks.com/howto/peanut.html

Free ebook converter for Word - I've never used it. I have the $30 publisher. You can also do it manually since it is just a markup language, but takes a bit of getting used to.

I use the palm markup. It's not that bad. I've made a couple of books with it. You can get it here. I use the dropbook because I'm too cheap to buy the publisher.

[Philip Colmer]

Originally Posted by Jonathan1

At least there is when you start embedding pictures and other various things into the documents. Also when your page count starts to creep up into the 500 – 1000+ range flipping to various pages in the book is slooow and seriously detracts from the e-book experience if you have to wait for the e-book reader to paginate.

There are ways of encoding the book that can avoid this problem.

It is largely down to how the Reader software handles the contents of the .lit file, but it is a little bit complicated to explain :-)

I am planning on writing a follow-up article, as you will see when the second part of this article is published. Hopefully, that second article will help with the understanding of how the .lit format works and why you are seeing this behaviour.

Note that I'm not saying it is GOOD behaviour - but understanding why things happen can help :-)

--Philip

[ironguy]

I used to use the word addin to create .lit files for Reader. It was OK. A little time consuming sometimes to convert an HTML file to whatever text and formatting I wanted and then create the product. I found myself building lits over and over as the font would be too big or some other oddity.

I then found uBook which can read directly from html, text, zip, rar, pdb, prc, etc. Since I've done this I haven't opened reader (except for an occassional lit file).

Heck, I can even read Mazingo with it!

I know, this is a little off topic...

[William]

Originally Posted by Philip Colmer

On the other hand, PDF - probably the most popular and traditional "read only" format - sometimes isn't particularly suitable either. The reason for this is because PDF files are essentially electronic versions of the printed page - they will typically be A4 or Letter sized pages which can make them tricky to read sensibly on a Pocket PC.

With the Reflow option (available in most documents) in Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC, PDF files are perfectly suitable, especially if you make your own.

[Ed Hansberry]

Originally Posted by William

With the Reflow option (available in most documents) in Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC, PDF files are perfectly suitable, especially if you make your own.

Just dog-slow.

[Crystal Eitle]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

Just dog-slow.

And hard to read. No Cleartype.

[William]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

Just dog-slow.

Huh? Maybe only with complicated picture rich documents; with docs containing only plain text I see no difference compared to Reader docs.

Originally Posted by spacewaitress

And hard to read. No Cleartype.

I must have bad eyes - I prefer normal text over ClearType text. I think ClearType is harder to read.

[Ed Hansberry]

Originally Posted by William

Huh? Maybe only with complicated picture rich documents; with docs containing only plain text I see no difference compared to Reader docs.

Compare it to Repligo or Palm Reader and there is a world of difference. Even compared to MS Reader and .LIT files, Adobe is very slow, especially when you turn to a new PDF page, not just flipping to the next screen.

[Tom W.M.]

This is kinda off topic, (and it may sound stupid) but:

FOr small books, this Word macro is pretty nice...

Is it actually a macro? If it is, can the source be viewed, or is it somehow protected? Seems like it would be really slow as a macro, too.

[Ed Hansberry]

Originally Posted by Tom W.M.

This is kinda off topic, (and it may sound stupid) but:

Is it actually a macro? If it is, can the source be viewed, or is it somehow protected? Seems like it would be really slow as a macro, too.

It is VBA - Visual Basic for Applications, and it semi-compiles. It is quite fast. It isn't a macro that physically has to manipulate the text. It is a subset of VBA - likely reads the entire document into RAM, processes it, calls an external DLL or other API for compaction and encryption then pops out a .LIT file.

I suspect if you knew the APIs and had the other dll's that came with the installer, you could generate .LIT files from just about Office app if you wanted.