Re: [NTLK] Newton books - Reader/converter for Mac/Win?

From: Woody Smith (woody_at_bitstream.net)
Date: Sun Jun 13 2004 - 20:45:58 PDT


I don't actually have a solution to Mircea's request, but I have
mentioned saving Newton Books as Newtworks documents. I discovered
this capability after installing Steve Weyer's NewtsCape and the
extension HTMList.

I have used this approach when a book that I wanted to read was created
with a font that was too small for me, once in Newtworks I could adjust
the font and size to one I liked. For comfortable reading you need to
keep the curser on the page you are reading or when you close the app
and reopen it will return you to where ever the curser was.

As a Newtworks document the book can be edited (read annotating) and
underlined. It can also be exported to your desktop computer through
NCU.

Newton Books that are 'Packages' on a Mac can have the text extracted
using Word 98, I don't know about Windows or other versions of Word.
In fact text can be extracted from PaperBack Packages or any other
Package that has text.
Choose Open, select a package and when asked about conversion, choose
'recover text form any file'. Be prepared to do some editing.

Woody

On Sunday, June 13, 2004, at 02:21 PM, Dan wrote:

>> Is there a means to preserve the worked-on books? I figure that the
>> most convenient trick would be to export the books back on a desktop
>> machine and to have a reader capable to open them or a converter
>> capable to transform them to RTF, or PDF, or whatever.
>> If no such capability exists, it means that the Newton "holds a
>> monopoly" over the books, each time you want to revisit old reading,
>> print segments, being obliged to dock you Newton, make room on it,
>> get the book back on it, etc.
>
snip

> The only other method of preserving annotations might be (if you have
> a 2x00
> or emate) to use Newtworks and Newtscape to copy the book from the
> book
> package to a Newtworks document. However I don't know if the
> annotations
> will copy as well. Perhaps Woody can chime in here as to weather that
> works
> or not (I know he has copied books to Newtworks before).
>
>

snip

>
> I also should mention a great tool for the NewtonBook user called
> XNewtbook.
> It allows you to backup the library soup, go directly to pages that
> have
> annotations, and have more bookmarks per book. The only downside is
> it seem
> to have a bug in the restoring of a library soup (at least it never
> worked
> for me). But you can use a soup editor as I previously mentioned to
> restore
> the backup it makes.
>
> -Dan

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