Imagine being able to access thousands of previously unavailable
documents, electronic books, and other publications on your Handheld or
Pocket PC. Thanks to AportisDoc Mobile (www.aportis.com), you can now do this. AportisDoc Mobile is a document reader originally developed for the Palm OS, but now available for all Handheld and Pocket PCs (CE 2.11 and above). With this new application, over 6,000 "Palm Doc" documents can now be viewed on the Handheld, Palm-size, or Pocket PC (see Screens 1 & 2).
Screen 1: AportisDoc Mobile as viewed on the 1/2 VGA screen of a Handheld PC. This screen shows how you can quickly access your bookmarks by using the handy pull-down menu.
Screen 2: AportisDoc Mobile as viewed on the screen of a Pocket PC. The bookmarks menu pops up from the bottom right of the Pocket PC's display.
Palm Doc is a popular Palm OS document and eBook format that has been
around since 1996. Originally, documents were viewed on Palm OS devices
using the built-in MemoPad application and the size of the document
files was limited to 4 Kb. Several third-party Palm developers
introduced MemoPad-type applications that could handle larger documents.
In 1996, Rick Bram (www.digitalglyph.com) developed Doc. Rick's program
used a different document format, called "Palm Doc," and it could handle small, medium-sized, or very large documents. In 1997, Aportis Technologies acquired the rights to Doc and it became known as
"AportisDoc." In the last five years, Palm Doc has become a very popular document format. Classical literature, magazine articles, medical files, Biblical commentaries, TV show episode guides, and much more have been converted to the Palm Doc format.
Using AportisDoc Mobile on a Pocket PC
Installing AportisDoc Mobile is easy and using the program is
straightforward. AportisDoc Mobile comes with two manuals, one in Palm
Doc format and the other in PDF format. If you want something more
interesting, check out MemoWare (www.memoware.com). MemoWare boasts over
6,000 documents in the Palm Doc format. The Aportis Web site has a mirror of MemoWare's document library (www.aportis.com/library).
Download a document and copy the .pdb or .prc file to the "My
Documents" folder on your Pocket or Handheld PC. Start AportisDoc
Mobile on your device, tap "eBook" in the taskbar, and then
Open. Select the title you want from the menu that appears, and you're
ready to read. One great feature is that AportisDoc remembers where you
were reading. If you exit a document, the next time you load that
document AportisDoc Mobile automatically recalls where you left off and
starts the document at that point.
AportisDoc Mobile has three menus: eBook, Go, and View
The eBook menu is used to open documents, display details about the
document, and set reading preferences. The Preferences option in the
eBook menu lets you change fonts and font size and set scroll
preferences. Within the Preferences option, the "Scroll By" field lets you set the document to scroll a line at a time, a page at a time, or a page minus a line each time. You can scroll manually by tapping the screen or by using a hardware button or action wheel, or you can let AportisDoc scroll for you. To use this "autoscroll" feature, set "Scroll Time" in Preferences to determine how fast the document will scroll and then enable the "Autoscroll" feature from the View menu.
The Go menu has a Find option that lets you search a document for a
specific word or short phrase. The Bookmarks option lets you go to a
bookmark, delete an existing one, or add a new one. The Go menu also
lets you move to the top or bottom of a document, and a "To Percentage..." option lets you move from 10% to 100% of the way through a document.
Printer-friendly version
