Writing
Freeware Applications
For slightly more organization than is possible with Memo Pad, you can use an application such as Projects: each list might be a work in progress, each category a chapter, each item a section, and the note on each item the text. An item might be checked to indicate the section is complete, reflected in the “official” manuscript, or so forth.
In all of the editing solutions considered so far, sections of text have a limit of 4096 characters. While this can be worked around in various ways—continuing text in another memo on another item, for example—this can be somewhat inconvenient, and most of the justification for a Palm OS device is convenience. The Memo Pad technique works well for short to moderate sized documents in which a 600-word chunk is useful. For documents naturally falling into longer chunks—up to about 5,000 words—you can use CryptoPad (remember to keep the category encrypted!) or other long record editors such as MegaMemo2.
For more elaborate organization, you can use an outliner such as Progect. The outline items would be the topics covered; the notes on the outline items would be the actual text. This has the disadvantage of once again imposing a 4-kilobyte (600 word) character limit per section, but the ability to create as many sub-sections as required for any section mitigates this. A variation on this theme would be to use the commercial product Natara Bonsai, which provides both outlining and 32 kilobyte (5,000 word) notes. The larger size of Bonsai notes permits a reasonable sized chapter to fit into in one or two notes.
Finally, when nothing but an indefinitely large continuous stream of text will do, you can use a “doc” file editor. This file format was developed specifically for storing book-length text files on handheld devices. The text is held internally as a series of 4-kilobyte chunks, but the boundaries between chunks can be hidden by the user interface. Also, the text can be stored in compressed form, to fit even more text into your Palm OS device. While the most transparent “doc” file editors are commercial products, the freeware zDocm “doc” file editor may fit your needs.
Alas, most of the freeware solutions presented fail once the first draft is done. There is no easy way to get the text out of the Palm and into a PC application! There is no desktop companion application for Crypto Pad, Projects, Progect. The nagware QEX program can handle zDocm databases, and MegaMemo2 has a companion program that can handle that program’s databases, although in either case you must locate the database in the Palm OS device’s backup directory on the PC.
Programs without companion applications on the PC can be handled in either of two ways. The first way, which uses only supported mechanisms, involves copying and pasting the text desired to a series of memos, syncing the Palm OS device, and copying and pasting the text from the memos to the desired PC application. The second way is to use, for example, Notepad on the PC to extract the text from the application’s database backup, and paste the text into the desired PC application.
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Copyright © 2002 Brian Hetrick
Page last updated 15 July 2003.
