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| Author | I found a possibly free ebook software candidate! (Read 16399 times) | ||||||
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cballero
1024 MB  Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever 
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on: April 30, 2024, 19:06
So I thought carefully about what to look for as far as software that would make a good candidate for a worthy ebook format for Classic Macs, and the PalmPilot as an ebook platform seemed like a darn good spot to go hunting for a 'low-hanging-fruit' format, especially since repurposing a Classic Mac web browser could only get the project part of the way there, so why not find something that could tackle both formats? And I found one!  http://web.archive.org/web/20160415203050if_/http://www.plkr.org/ For Classilla http://web.archive.org/web/20160415203050id_/http://www.plkr.org/ (in my tests, the second link doesn't choke Classilla!) The Plucker (PDB) format's open-source and commands some XML/HTML formats just like epub files and it also converts web pages to its format! But more interesting to me is that it has a Palm Pilot, as well as multi-platform converters covering early OS X, older Linux, Windows and even an OS/2 application! Plus Plucker is a predecesor to the epub format, so they are very similar, with the added advantage that its file format's simpler in composition, so it's as close to epubs as we can get while still holding a lot of legacy compatibility not readily found in older epub software. And being that the PalmPilot platform is based on the Motorola chipset, I imagine bringing this to the Classic Mac OS would be far easier than newer software options, right?  The gallery page shows examples of how plucker looks on a PalmPilot screen and I like what I see: http://web.archive.org/web/20150317182352_id/http://www.plkr.org/gallery I'm sure other formats may be out there, so I'm starting the conversation to see what else we can find or if this may be a good starting point. The beauty of epubs is that they can be converted to PDB ebooks compatible with this program, so I'm thinking that porting this application format has additional value and merit. |
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #1 on: April 30, 2024, 19:29
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That looks VERY promising! The two parts are the Palm reader app and the tools used to convert and format the ebooks for it to read. Porting the Plucker app to classic MacOS could definitely be a project. This'd be a LOT easier than porting a more modern reader app, since we know it is small, to run on a Palm. And since there are already ports to other systems, we know a lot of the code is already portable! Even better, PalmOS is shockingly similar to a simplified/limited version of classic MacOS! So porting would be far simpler than doing so from Windows or modern Linux/MacOS, etc. And more, you're correct since it's Motorola based, we wouldn't have to deal with endian issues, etc. ---- It looks like the web archiver did NOT grab the source code: https://web.archive.org/web/20150628081527/http://www.plkr.org/download/source But I found it here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/plucker/files/plucker/1.8/ So...interested in this as a project? The first steps would be taking the source, creating a CodeWarrior project for the Palm version source and just trying (naively) to build it. Errors will show up for all the Palm-isms...which we'd then fix and/or put #ifdef _PALM (or #ifndef _MAC, or similar) around. It will, of course, not build, but that will show us everywhere we need to work on. Unfortunately, the reader is relatively sophisticated, at least as far as Palm apps go, so there will be a LOT to fix/replace...things like menus, dialog boxes, preferences setting windows, etc will need Mac equivalents...but getting a version that actually just displays something, but otherwise has no gui, is definitely possible... ---- I've been itching to get back into Palm development so this aspect interests me...ie I'd have fun building the Palm app separately anyway! One thing you may not know, is that CodeWarrior for Palm comes with a library that implements/simulates the Palm gui, but building as a classic m68k Mac application. (The same way the iOS simulator in XCode works on MacOS X). So, you can probably get a (very very ugly, tiny window) Mac app just by building it in CodeWarrior using only that.
Last Edit: April 30, 2024, 20:37 by lauland
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