PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, Second Edition

Making Your Own E-books

Though many people use the PalmPilot as a glorified paperback, many others load their own material onto the PalmPilot for later review. Unfortunately, the PalmPilot doesn’t display bold, italic, style sheets, and other formatting niceties from your word processor documents; but at least you retain the text itself, which is good enough for shifting many important reading tasks into more convenient time slots (particularly when traveling).

The program you use to turn your own word processor files into Doc files is called MakeDoc. In the shareware world, there are several versions, one each for the Macintosh, Windows, DOS, and Java. (These versions are included with this book.) A superior, but costlier, avenue, is Documents to Go, which offers drag-and-drop conversion for Word documents.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to turning your own word processor files into Doc files, complete with formatting tips from a battle-scarred veteran.

Preparing the Original Word Processor File

The original document is shown in Figure 10.11. Note that it’s full of formatting: some paragraphs are indented, some are bolded, others italicized. All of this will be lost in the conversion to the PalmPilot. Therefore, note that the preparer has cleverly typed the title of the document in capital letters; as you can see in Figure 10.13, all-caps phrases are great for PalmPilot headings, because it’s the only distinctive treatment you can give a headline on the formatting-free PalmPilot. ...