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Subject:RE: PalmOS and mobile usage of documents From:<Daniel_Hall -at- trendmicro -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 8 Dec 2003 09:15:23 -0800
Gunther,
At my last job, I was asked to produce a good number of job aids for the Palm OS platform, where the audience was technicians working on hardware in the field. These documents contained the important reference information that techs required to set radio frequencies, adjust various components, and order replacement parts. After a lot of research, I chose the Palm doc format, which is read with the (free) Palm Reader.
My advice: download the free Palm Reader tool called Dropbook (a Google search should find it) to produce Palm doc files, and just mark up plain text copies of your documents. The markup is very easy (there are only about 15 tags) and Palm doc format has the advantage of _never_ requiring side-to-side scrolling, unlike various other Palm "document" solutions like Acrobat, Word "converters" like Docs-To-Go, or most of the HTML viewers.
One final note: The doc format allows the inclusion of images, but unless you have some absolute management requirement, they are generally not worth including. If you take into account the limited storage capacity and screen real estate of the "average" Palm out there, they just don't make a lot of sense.
If you have additional, specific questions, feel free to contact me off list.
Good luck,
Daniel
-----Original Message-----
From: bounce-techwr-l-129804 -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
[mailto:bounce-techwr-l-129804 -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com]On Behalf Of Gunther
Schmidt
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2003 10:01 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: PalmOS and mobile usage of documents
Hi Whirlers,
as a technical writer and user of a PDA with PalmOS I would like to know if
there are any systems which are designed to deliver documents for mobile
usage on a Palm. The current PalmOS devices with high-resultion displays,
memory card support etc. and document converters/readers like iSilo
(http://www.isilo.com) offer several features which make these PDAs usable
for documents with hyperlinks, tables, images and much more.
Does somebody have any examples for the use of PalmOS PDAs to access
technical documentation?
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