From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Thu Apr 22 2004 - 05:37:17 PDT
Aux environs du 21/04/04 à 22:15 -0500, sous le titre "Re: [NTLK]
Newton Book or Newton Paperback, which is be", Eric Morgan prit sa
plus belle plume pour écrire les mots suivants:
>The PBBookMaker application seems to create boosk readable only on
>hardware that runs Newton OS 2.0.
2.x. Because it generates an optimized version for NewtonOS 2.x. But
the code could be changed to support 1.x as well.
>The books will have no search
>capability, and finally, the Paperback application is not installed in
>the books thus requiring the user to have at least one Newton Paperback
>file that does include the application. I can not assume this will be
>be the case. Truly cool technology, but too many limits on who will be
>able to take advantage of the solution. Alas. We were close.
You know, there is something called intellectual property.
PBBookMaker generates books with no intellectual property from David
Fedor. They are compatible but different, and that's why they only
have the basic functions.
PBBookMaker is just a sample code. That's why it has no graphical interface.
Actually, the current mood within the DCL Group is to build programs
for ourselves only. The code in the DCL was written between 1999 and
2004, it is a very large project with more than 60K lines of C++, and
we have little or no feedback at all (except Eckhart saying it's
great and the recent work from Hendrik to get it working on Windows,
thanks guys). We get very few bug reports. Hence Nicolas often says
that 100% of DCL users mean 3 people. I don't even know why I spent
two full days in the bowels of NIE to fix the stupid -4 error bug we
suffer about when doing file browsing over TCP/IP since I'm the only
TCP/IP DCL user and I can cope without file browsing.
That's why we generate 2.x books. Nicolas, Michael and I only have
2.x Newtons. Actually, I did this for Nicolas and Michael, I don't
even read on my Newton.
That's also why the only additional function I did include is the
capability to use ISO-8859-2 and Unicode text and any font including
fonts with Eastern European characters, as I did this for Michael who
mostly uses BookMaker because Paperback cannot handle Eastern
European characters properly. PBBookMaker, although not perfect as it
does not include the search function as you noted, fixes this
problem. Just install a dummy PB book on your Newton and you can take
fully advantage of PBBookMaker. We don't consider it a major flaw.
Since the release of PBBookMaker, I got the authorization from David
Fedor to include his code in books that will be generated by
PBBookMaker. I may release a new version with more features than what
currently is avaiable in PaperBack, but I cannot estimate yet what
fellow DCL developers want most and hence what I should work on.
I just can't understand why you mean to develop another solution
while most of the technology for what you want to do is here (as you
say: we were close).
Paul
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