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What is QT Reader?
==================
QT Reader is an e-text reading program which understands several
varieties of PalmDoc format (types 1,2 and 4), zTxt, plain text and
gzipped text.
In addition it supports its own very highly compressed format which is
based on ppm (regarded by many as the best available compression
technique) with modifications by Fabrice Bellard for speed and memory
efficiency and by myself to support random access on smaller
devices. I call this modified format ppms (for ppm, segmented).
The ppms program which is used to produce ppms files from plain text
is available from http://www.timwentford.uklinux.net where there is
also a comparison of file sizes produced by several compression
methods. This is summarised below:
Compression method Size in bytes Memory required to decompress
Plain text 573714 N/A
Makedoc (PalmDoc format) 329543 2k
ppms (default) 184187 350k
ppms (best) 151733 800k
bzip2 -1 180175 340k
bzip2 -9 154280 2.2M
The default settings used here were chosen to suit the Agenda VR3. I
would expect the Zaurus to be able to use settings which give 170kb
file size and 500k memory without any problem. The format encodes the
settings used so the user may choose whatever suits them. I choose
based on the amount of memory required and on whether or not pageup
performance is acceptable.
General Use
===========
Start it up and then choose "File/Open" from the menu. Select a
palmdoc, plain text, gzipped text or ppms file from the file selector
and use the cursor keys to page up/down (up/down keys) and to make the
text size comfortable (left/right keys) and thats it for most
uses. See below for more advanced use.
What the Menu Options Do
========================
File
====
File operations live in this menu.
Open Brings up the file selector to allow you to choose a
new file to read.
Info Displays info about the currently open file. Needs
reformatting.
Start Block Marks the text at the top of the currently displayed
page ready for copying.
Copy Block Copies all text from the mark to the bottom of the
currently displayed page to the clipboard.
Scroll Starts/stops autoscroll. The speed can be adjusted
using the up/down keys while autoscroll is on (page
up and down are still functional and can be activated
by using the up and down arrows on the task bar).
Jump Jumps to a specific offset in the file. If you note
down the current location from the File/Info display
you can then jump to the same position again using
this function (or you could bokmark it 8^)).
Page/Line scroll When this is On pressing the arrows (keys or
icons on the task bar) moves you a page at a time.
When this is off, pressing the arrows moves you a
line at a time.
Set Overlap Sets the number of lines of overlap between pages
when scrolling by page.
Set Dictionary When you tap on the screen the word under the
pointer is copied to the clipboard ready for pasting
into (e.g.) a dictionary program. Using this function
allows the word to be sent to compatible dictionary
programs direct. The format is exename/messagename
where exename is the name of the executable for the
dictionary program and messagename is the name of the
message it is expecting. You can get some idea of how
it works by using some debug functionality which I
deliberately left in QTReader. Set this to
uqtreader/info.
To deactivate it again, set it to /.
Find Brings up the search requester where you can enter a
regular expression to search (again) for.
Format
======
Used to alter the way the text is reformatted before display.
Strip CR Removes those pesky DOS crs from the file.
Strip HTML Uses a very simple minded filter to remove html mark-up.
Dehyphen Removes hyphens from e-texts which have been formatted to
fit on different sized displays by hyphenating words
which no longer appear at the end of the line.
Unindent Removes leading spaces from the beginning of paragraphs.
Re-paragraph Removes/adds line breaks as necessary to make the text
look nice on the display.
Double Space Adds an extra space between paragraphs.
Indent+ Increases the number of extra leading spaces inserted
before paragraphs.
Indent- Decreases the number of extra leading spaces inserted
before paragraphs.
Bold Sets the font to bold (if its supported by the currently
selected font).
For e-texts from fictionwise I don't need any of these enabled. For
Project Gutenberg e-texts I enable Strip CR, Re-paragraph and either 3 lots
of indent+ and/or double space.
Zoom Menu option not implemented but pops up an info box
telling you that left/right cursor keys will zoom
out/in.
Ideogram/Char grouping When selected, treats each character as a word
and enforces uniform character spacing - suitable for
many eastern character sets. When not selected, looks for
spaces in the text to identify words - suitable for most
western texts. (I'm not a language expert so forgive my,
probably inaccurate, generalisations).
Set Width Sets the character spacing as a percentage of the text
height to be used when in ideogram mode. Start at 100 and
experiment to find what you like best.
Encoding Allows you to choose from a variety of codings. Ascii is
actually unprocessed text so its precise behaviour may
depend on the machines locale setting. Palm and code page
1252 are very similar and are useful if you have an etext
aimed at Palms or Windows machines which use an extended
character set - though you will need to use a unicode
enabled font to show all the characters. The U... fonts
are different varieties of unicode encodings. If you
don't know what that means you probably don't need them
(they allow texts to access the full range of characters
required for non US English languages).
Set Font Allows you to choose which font the text is displayed
in. Helvetica or smoothtimes are probably best for ascii type
texts, unifont or cyberbit (if you have installed them)
are best for extended character sets (other unicode fonts
may also be available but these are all I've found, so far).
Marks
=====
Mark Saves the current position as a bookmark
Goto Allows selection of a bookmark to jump to.
Delete Deletes an unwanted bookmark from the current text.
Autogen Displays a box for entering a regular
expression which will be used to determine which
paragraphs (not lines) will be marked to allow jumping to
directly using the Goto option. The format options
described above are applied before the regular expression
matching is done.
This operation is performed in the background allowing
you to continue paging up/down the e-text.
Clear Deletes all in-memory bookmarks from the current document.
Save Saves the "in-memory" bookmarks to disk.
Tidy Deletes bookmark file for a document. The operations
above work on an in-memory copy of the bookmarks. This
option makes that copy more permanent (you will also be
prompted to save the bookmarks when closing a text if the
in-memory copy is different to the saved copy).
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