Book People Archive

Free program to prettify etexts for PDAs

Hello, Book-People--

If you have ever tried to read an ASCII etext (like most of
Gutenberg's) on a PDA, you have probably noticed that because of the
hard line breaks in the original text, the text sometimes flows very
poorly. For example:
             
My Visor only has a screen length
of about thirty-five characters, so
when
I go to read a Gutenberg etext on
its tiny screen, the lines are broken
all
wrong; I get a couple of normal-sized
lines, and then a tiny, chopped-off
line,
and it's all very annoying and hard
to read.

Well, I got tired of reflowing etexts by hand before I loaded them
into my Visor, so I wrote a Perl script to do it for me automatically.
Although it is quick'n'dirty, it tries to be smart, and won't reflow
poetry or tables of contents into a big mush if used properly.

The program is called 'pdaflow' and is released under the GNU General
Public License. You can find it here:

  http://www.ludism.org/~rwhe/pdaflow/
             
Since it's a Perl script, you do need Perl to run it.

I welcome questions, suggestions, and changes. 

Ron H-E

p.s. For my etext reading, I use a Handspring Visor Deluxe and TealDoc
or CSpotRun. However, I am strongly in favour of free software and
will shortly be ordering an Agenda VR3 from agendacomputing.com. This
PDA runs GNU/Linux, and I hope to port CSpotRun (also under the GPL)
to it. Is anyone else on the list thinking of migrating to more open
platforms? (I have no connection with any of the entities mentioned in
this paragraph, apart from using their stuff.)
-- 
    Ron's Info Closet: Center for Ludic Synergy, Kennexions Glass Bead Game,
     Positive Revolution FAQ, Hexagram-8 I Ching Mailing List, and links...
             Ron Hale-Evans ... <http://www.apocalypse.org/~rwhe/>
  rwhe@[redacted] ... Further up and further in! fnord ... rwhe@[redacted]