Tomeraider for Linux?

An anonymous reader asks: "Those who read e-books on PDAs may probably know that 'tomeraider' is a very popular format. After a few searches I've found Tomeraider for PDA's and Windows, and even utilities to convert from HTML to the tomeraider format on Linux. But I haven't seen anything that actually lets you VIEW tomeraider files on a Linux desktop. Does anyone know of an application that is open source and supports this format? What are the options and what works best?"

Comments

w00t!

[Twintop]

Yeah, Linux Geeks need a 'lil Lara Croft too! Oh, wait, tomeraider? Oops, my bad...

Re:w00t!

[Anonymous Coward]

.:cough-cough:.

an empty theater is filled with the sounds od no one laughing.

Linux users are gay

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they want to play a game with Lara Croft? Maybe if you talking about something like Gay Ass Raiders or something.

What are my options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you can either get up or go back to sleep.

Doesn't exist.

[3-State Bit]

I just searched for 15 minutes on Google, and I would be extremely surprised if any project anywhere displayed TomeRaider files under Linux.

Perhaps you can get an EPOC emulator to run it under linux, or (doubt it exists for Linux; seen it on Windows) a PalmOS emulator. Then there's always WINE. Or, you could run the palm-OS emulator under WINE. Either way, frankly I don't understand why you'd want to run on Linux what is a fairly low-interest application. tomeraider + viewer returns 1,100+ hits, versus 25,000+ of gpl pdf viewer -- d'you know, PDF is an open format now. View a linux browser e.g. here, which is GPL'd, but of course the most robust and mature free-to-use Linux solution is Adobe's. See first two entries here, to create and view PDF files respectively. (Free to use.)

As the bylines say, Tomeraider's just a "freeware application for the TomeRaider format available for PalmOS, EPOC [a PalmOS competitor -3-state], PocketPC and Windows platforms."
And that's it.
Why you would want to run under linux what seems mostly to be a format supported under handhelds is beyond me....

It doesn't seem serious to me. Forget about it.

Besides, learn PDF-making software and I'll be happy to receive your documents exactly as you intended them to look without your having to do anything outside of instant, no-tweaking WYSIWYG, and without a proprietary format.

Wanna' know why MS word is so popular in the office?
Cuz' the document you get looks like the document I sent, and you can edit it as such, and return it, and the document I get returned looks just like it did when you finished working on it.

Can't say that of many widely used document formats...

Therefore, let's all adopt PDF.

It's democratic. It's Free. It's..... OPEN SOURCE!

Re:Doesn't exist.

[seann]

best fuckin rant in awhile
only thing to ad: the original PALM os was built in UNIX, palm aquired it and ported it to windows.
Linux versions exist, nativly.
bye

Re:Doesn't exist.

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Therefore, let's all adopt PDF.

Hear, hear. It always cracks me up when I hear or read somebody deriding PDF because... well, honestly I'm not sure why. Because Adobe invented it or something. Anyway, they hop up and down and spit and gesticulate about how PDF is bad and wrong, and how TeX and XML are the only true document formats.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here on my Mac saving everything-- web pages, screen shots, documents, basically everything that I want to keep and don't need to edit directly-- as PDF, straight out of my applications. Easy as la-la-la.

PDF is absolutely one of the great innovations of the 90's.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[samjam]

they hop up and down and spit and gesticulate

I've seen them do this, it is a pitiful sight. Some of them can't even walk and chew gum at the same time.

PDF is postscript plus the bits it needs to make it work everywhere.

However tomeraider is not so good IMHO, Mobi Pocket Reader is much better and comes with a free ebook builder for windows, but sadly doesn't supports linux either and wine chokes on installshield install. It seems to be, roughly, a compressed html browser.

Sam

Re:Doesn't exist.

[biglig2]

Well, PDF is great, sure, but isn't it a little sucky for handhelds, given that it includes a definition of the page size?

And in any case, he isn't asking "what format should I use" he's asking "I have a buncha stuff in this format, can I read it under Linux?"

I use Palm DOC format myself, as it has the widest range of readers, including some native Linux readers - but each to their own. It's so messy not having an agreed standard - DOC is the most popular, but there are so many others, each with a significant market share. Could be worse, he could have e-books in .lit format. ;-)

Anyhow, to get back to the original question, 3-state has exactly the right idea - get hold of a copy of the POSE emulator (apt-get pose 3.5-1 or whatever your own flavour requires ;-), find a ROM somewhere (sign up as a developer or doewnload a copy of your own Palm) and load TomeRaider on it.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[JJGreenaway]

Nice rant, but TomeRaider isn't anything like PDF I'm afraid. It's more of a database than an ebook - it's main use is large reference works, dictionaries, encyclopedias etc. You start typing a word in your handheld and it instantly finds the entry for it, even for docs 10s of MB in size. And all the entries can be cross referenced and linked. It's really quite neat.

TomeRaider isn't freeware either - it's shareware. It's be fantastic if there was an open source equivalent, but as far as I know there isn't...

Re:Doesn't exist.

[pete-classic]

PDF doesn't really compete with TeX or XML, but with PS and DVI.

-Peter

Re:Doesn't exist.

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Yes, I know. But the argument often comes up, particularly on Slashdot. On the one side you have people who think that PDF is a great format for digital documents and whatnot. On the other side, you have people who bitch about it's being "proprietary" and say TeX and XML are the only politically acceptable formats.

This doesn't make sense to anyone, least of all me. But it comes up all the time.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[0x0d0a]

Wanna' know why MS word is so popular in the office?
Cuz' the document you get looks like the document I sent, and you can edit it as such, and return it, and the document I get returned looks just like it did when you finished working on it.

Can't say that of many widely used document formats...

Therefore, let's all adopt PDF.

PDF isn't designed for editable content, and Word files are. This is actually a major source of irritation for me.

Word documents are frequently used to hand information around. This is DUMB. I don't care if you're an MS shop, you love MS and you'd like nothing more than to give 50% of your yearly revenue to MS, Word documents are a fucking awful publication format. They're good for collaborating, actively working on documents when everyone uses Word. However, people that hand out documentation or similar in DOC format should stop.

Reasons to use PDF instead of Word files when releasing read-only information:
* You don't have to worry about the remote person having the proper fonts -- you can embed all needed information
* You don't have to worry about macro viruses
* You don't have to worry about old version of Word not being able to import your document
* You don't have to worry about formatting differences when a newer version of Word mis-imports your document
* Acrobat Reader is a much better "reader" from a UI standpoint than Word
* PDFs can be read by anyone on almost any platform
* Acrobat Reader is free, unlike Word
* You're pretty much guaranteed no printing issues with a PDF.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[ibennetch]

Forgive my ignorance about PDF files. I know the creator of these files is Adobe Distiller - is there a standard creator *other* than this (last I checked) pay product? A quick search reveals that there are tons of links, but none seem terribly...reputable. Obviously I have checked Google, but I want other's input - what's the best way to create PDF files? Is it worth the money for Distiller?

While I'm posting anyway; what's the big deal about PDF? The files aren't editable (AFAIK) - what's the standard for *editable* text? .RTF? .DOC? I laugh at the second one. I've sent .doc files from one version of word to another and it's messed up the format. So that's not seeming to be a good method of editing text. .RTF, to my knowledge, is the best way to pass around editable text (other than as, say, plain text) - is this true?

thanks

Re:Doesn't exist.

[MrResistor]

There are all sorts of ways to create PDFs on Linux, usually via Ghostscript. For Windows, though, last time I looked there was Distiller and that was about it. I saw rumors that you could hack Ghostscript to run on Windows, but I was never able to find any reliable information in that regard.

Summary: yes there are free PDF tools, but not for Windows.

In my experience, Distiller is OK, but can be difficult to work with. There is a better way, which is included with the full version of Acrobat, which allows you to print to PDF. It uses a dummy postscript printer (you have to have a postscript printer driver installed) and then converts the postscript to PDF, which introduces a lot less errors than Distiller does. I believe that's what is done with Ghostscript, which is actually a postscript tool.

Distiller is usually fine for text documents, but generally sucks for things like CAD drawings, which comprises most of my PDF experience. It's probably worth it to spring the $250 for the full version of Acrobat, especially if you can just set it up on one machine as a shared printer (never tried it, so I don't know if it can be done). If you're looking at buying a license for every workstation, though, you probably want to at least look into the Ghostscript thing.

I definately agree about RTF for text documents, but PDF does more than just text.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[ibennetch]

Ah, I see. Thanks MrResistor for your comments. I was under the impression that Distiller was the dummy printer - not having used them, and not having any interest in paying $250 for what would amount to once a month use by a student for things that are now done as .rtf or .jpgs; I didn't bother to learn enough about Distiller to realize it was seperate from the dummy printer. The dummer printer seems to be a really cool option; I've used that once or twice several years ago and it worked flawlessly. It would be nice if there were a free replacement for that (sighs wishfully).

thanks again for your comments.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[sir99]

Summary: yes there are free PDF tools, but not for Windows.

Ghostscript runs fine on Windows, and it isn't in any way a hack. See here for the latest Ghostscript release. I use a wonky combination of Ghostscript, Acrobat Reader, and a freeware Windows LPD in order to print documents to my Winprinter over the network.

In my limited experience, GS does a better PS->PDF conversion than Distiller. Conversely, Acrobat Reader on Linux seems to do a better job at PDF->PS.

There really aren't many native PDF tools per se, but it is true that many 'nix tools produce postscript, which can be easily converted to PDF. The only free tool I'm aware of that produces PDF natively is pdftex, which is available on Windows as part of the MiKTeX TeX distribution.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[toast0]

Microsoft makes a free word reader (for windows platforms only i think) that you can get from their website anyhow.

I think I heard about some sort of pdf virus fairly recently too, but I don't remember the details

I agree with your other reasons, and your conclusion.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

PDF is great for reading documents?, but how the heck do you edit something saved in PDF? If I could do that easily, I'm sure I'd use PDFs instead of MS Word (for sharing with others) of OpenOffice (for my own personal use, since nobody else has OO) formats.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[MrResistor]

Ghostscript runs fine on Windows, and it isn't in any way a hack.

Hmmm, that wasn't the impression that I got when I was looking into it, but that was over a year ago. I might look into it again if I ever need to do that on Windows again. Thanks for the info.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[Twirlip of the Mists]

how the heck do you edit something saved in PDF?

Duh. You don't, typically. Which is the great thing about PDF as a mastering format.

Some programs use PDF as their native file format, however, most notably Illustrator 10.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Ghostscript as far back as ~1993 - when it ran in 386 protected mode in DOS.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

the pdf virus you heard about is, as a slashdot comment pointed out, a script virus in the CREATION software (which supports macros to help automate the task of designing PDFs) -- not the reader.

Re:Doesn't exist.

[ibennetch]

You seem quite knowledgable and so I'll ask another question of you - how does one creat a PS file under Windows? is it at all useful - I thought PS files were a pretty much unix-only thing, and at that; rarely used in favor of, say, PDF, et al.

Is there a difference in functionality between PDF and PS?

Re:Doesn't exist.

[sir99]

Postscript is often generated by Windows when it sends a job to a laser printer. Given that, the easiest way to make postscript in Windows is probably to add a fake postscript printer (you don't need the physical printer, Windows just needs to think it's there). You'd want to add a high-end color one if you want color.

Then when you want to generate postscript, you print to that printer, but select "print to file", and it will write the postscript to a file.

I think postscript is more popular than PDF for sending jobs to print shops and such. Postscript was around before PDF, and it's used as a native language for many laser printers (PCL is another common printer language). Most vector drawing programs like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator can generate postscript, and they can also import it. Many academic papers are distributed in postscript, probably because they were written in TeX.

PDF is used more as a document exchange format. It has almost exactly the same feature-set as postscript, but it's mostly binary, and I think it's supposed to be optimized for viewing on the Web. Postscript is actually a complete programming language that focuses on vector graphics. It's human readable, but most programs produce pretty obfuscated postscript. PDF and gzipped postscript tend to be about the same size.

Postscript doesn't really get developed any more, but PDF is actively developed by Adobe. So PDF gets features added such as hyperlinks, which are especially good for indexes and tables of contents, and encryption (although Adobe's PDF encryption was pathetic last I heard).

If you're interested, Adobe has postscript and PDF pretty well documented on their web site.

An interesting thread

[ianezz]

An interesting thread on the subject from comp.sys.palmtops.pilot.

Basically, little hope.

Opie Familiar on Ipaq?

[Dausha]

My interest in this topic is because I converted my Compaq^H^H^H^H^H^H HP Ipaq handheld from PocketPC to Linux Familiar (Opie). I'd like to cram as many eBooks as I can and like the data compression available with Palm Doc and Tomeraider formats. Does PDF have compression enough to compete with those formats? If so, are the readers small enough to not overwhelm my handheld's 64 Mb total memory?