[NTLK] NXPress Table of Contents and website change

From: James Nichols <smilr_at_mac.com>
Date: Thu Aug 03 2006 - 21:33:56 EDT

The website for Newton X Press has moved, the new site is at:

http://jnichols.slghtofcode.com/nxpress/

This makes for a much shorter URL. For now the old URL

As you can see, I've put up an explanation of my current quandary
regarding newton books on the website. In brief:

Newton Book package files only keep track of the page number that an
entry in the Table Of Contents matches with. During editing, and in
the old Newton Press' native file format, TOC entries are tied to
specific locations in the text. As this text moves about, so does the
TOC entry. As NXP works directly on Newton Packages containing
books, I can't have access to such a fine level of control over TOC
entries. I can approximate it, and such might work well enough for
casual use.

What I would LIKE to do is to add some extra information to the
package files that NXP creates. This extra data should hopefully be
ignored by Newtons, yet allow NXP to keep finer track of TOC entries.
I am expecting the amount of exra storage required by this to be
roughly 16 to 32 bytes per TOC entry.

Yes, this is a very small amount of data, but storage space on
Newton's is limited.

My alternatives include having NXP use it's own file format, much
like how the old Newton Press worked, or simply not tracking TOC
entries as closely as Newton Press did.

Do any of you have thoughts regarding this? Would you prefer one way
or the other?

I would prefer this discussion to be logged on the NXP website, but I
realize that responses here on the mailing list will (for now) reach
more eyes. Unless otherwise requested, I plan to copy and paste
responses I receive on the mailing list into the discussion thread on
my website.

Thank you!

J. Tyler Nichols

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Received on Thu Aug 3 21:36:20 2006

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