Re: [NTLK] PDF

From: Chris Swenson (cswenson_at_adobe.com)
Date: Thu Aug 30 2001 - 23:38:47 EDT


 I agree it would be great if someone wrote a Newton (or Waba) PDF viewer.
Itprobably wouldn't be too difficult to build a reader that adhered at least
to the PDF 1.3 spec, which Adobe has documented very well.

Until that day arrives, I know of a couple of ways one can go about viewing
PDFs on a Newton using Adobe Acrobat (full version).

(1) The Acrobat 5-to-rtf Conversion Method. Acrobat 5.0 now has the ability
to export to Rich Text Format (RTF). So, with Acrobat 5.0, open your PDF,
export to rtf, then import into Newton Press to create your Newton Book.
It'sthat simple. I've tried this a couple of times, and it works fine. Of
course, the conversion to rtf and the subsequent import into Newton Press
screws up the formatting. The more complex the formatting, the more
horribleit's going to look once converted, and the more work you're going to
have to do in Newton Press to fix the formatting. But for less-complex
documents this method will get the job done.

(2) The Acrobat 4-to-Palm Doc Conversion Method. If you don't have 5,
there'sa freeware plug-in called PDF2Doc that allows you to convert PDFs
intodoc files for the Palm. It can be found at:
http://tinystocks.com/pdf2doc.[1]html [2]Because this tool allows you to
editthe text in any text editor before converting to the doc format, you can
easily import this text into Newton Press. I've tried this as well and it
works fine. Not as good as option #1, but it's still OK (although the
plug-inworks with version 5 as well, if you have 5 you might as well skip
this method and output to rtf).

Granted, these options are a little tedious. If you're lazy, like me, you
probably would rather just import the PDF whole hog into your Newton. But
given that a great number of PDF files are really, really fat -- containing
all the fonts, graphics, and color separation information to maintain
document fidelity, together with the memory constraints of most Newtons,
these two options would have obvious advantages over a PDF viewer for the
Newton.

Chris

--- Chris Swenson Senior Market Research Analyst Adobe Systems Incorporated
206.675.7285 (Voice) 413.556.7938 (Fax) mailto:cswenson_at_adobe.com[3]

--- Links ---
   1 http://tinystocks.com/pdf2doc.html%A0
   2 http://tinystocks.com/pdf2doc.html%A0
   3 mailto:cswenson_at_adobe.com

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