Arch Linux

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

PDF reader for palm

Hey all,

I want to read pdf files on my palm. Pretty simple request, really.  Adobe's even got a reader for palm or something. Well, specifically, it seems to convert the pdfs to a simpler format or something, and they have a palm app that reads the simpler format.

Problem: adobe's software is windows or mac only.

Solution: ?????

Does anybody know of a PalmOS app I can install from inside Arch using jpilot (Oh, BTW, I did get the palm connecting to Arch finally. :-D) that will read generic pdf files?

Another possibility: does anybody know of a linux tool to convert pdf files to some other format (word, plain text, perhaps even an image) that I can read on my palm?

Thanks,
Dusty

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iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: PDF reader for palm

I think I saw a pdf2html floating around here somewhere.

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: PDF reader for palm

pdftohtml is in aur. It didn't work.

What I did was ps2ascii the file and then save that as a word document.

Dusty

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big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: PDF reader for palm

pdftohtml is in aur. It didn't work.

What do you mean "it didn't work"?

You could use Plucker. I've made a pkgbuild for it some time ago, I'll upload it to aur.

big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: PDF reader for palm

PKGBUILD for plucker is in aur, and pkgbuild for plucker-desktop (gui) also.

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: PDF reader for palm

by 'it didn't work', I mean that the output on the paper I wanted to read was a bunch of gibberish characters. The layout of the file actually seemed to work (two column view), but the text was wrong.

as for plucker.... ooooh, I can't wait to try it! ;-) Thanks very much.

I just found out that I can get a wifi card for my palm. Its at the top of my I really want this list, but I can't afford $140 for one.

Dusty

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big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: PDF reader for palm

Thats too expensive for what you get, I think. I'm using plucker to download news from a couple of sites (like SRC/CBC, BBC,...) and read them offline while on the bus. It works nicely. I don't know though how to read pdf with plucker, though it is said to be supported. Never bottered..:P

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: PDF reader for palm

I'll figure it out, IF its supported. We'll see. Thanks a lot, I'll give it a go later today.

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big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: PDF reader for palm

I just tryed rebuilding it and rpm2targz seems to be only in staging at ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/tur/staging/rpm … pkg.tar.gz
Just to let you know

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: PDF reader for palm

I'm getting a lot of different errors with the PKGBUILD; have you tested it recently?

First, a 404 on the source, then a md5sum error, and then I got several odd 'cannot stat' errors.

The plucker source code is available, so maybe it would be more sensible to build from source than to use the rpm? I'll maybe give it a go this evening.

Edit: it appears the source code bz2ball and zipfile are corrupt. yeurgh!!

Dusty

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big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: PDF reader for palm

I didn't test it since the time I've made it.

As you, I'm getting the 404. The file has been moved to sourceforge. I've corrected this.

There also seems to be some character encoding problems, caused by the author's name (maybe danish?) but else everything works here...

What doesn't work? "cannot stat" ?

big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: PDF reader for palm

I tryed compiling it, and I remember why I switched to the compiled version. The viewer to install on the palm needs a cross-compiler, and since I don't have experience for that, I decided to get the binary version.

I just created a .pdb file from SRC's web site...

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: PDF reader for palm

ah, ok...
can you do me a favour and send me an arch package (dusty at buchuki dot com). I'm getting tired tonight and won't have time to mess with it for a while.

From what I've read, the only way to get pdf output on plucker is to use http://www.jakewalk.de/palm/pdaconverter_e.html, which is a windows only app. However, I like plucker better than documents2go for reading, because of autoscroll, so I might use it anyway -- convert the file to text using ps2txt and then use plucker to convert it to plucker format. Too bad pdftohtml didn't work for me

Thanks!!

Dusty

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