.KEYWORD qed
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Edit large text files on your Palm computer with QED
.OTHER
.SUMMARY Did Santa bring you one of those spiffy new GoType! keyboards? He did? So now you want to know how you can do real word processing, writing nice, long documents right on your Palm computer. The Palm organizer’s own Memo Pad can handle about 4,000 characters, but if you want to go beyond that, you’re going to need a power tool like QED. In this interesting and helpful article, Eric Newman shows us how to get the most out of QED while avoiding the pitfalls of big document editing.
.AUTHOR Eric Newman
When I was contemplating the purchase of a handheld device, I of course had to consider the purposes for which I wanted it. Yes, it would be nice to have my contacts and appointments (such as they are) with me at all times, to calculate the number of days left until the year 2000, and to play games. But I really needed the ability to write and edit long documents while away from my desktop PC.
The Palm organizer at first seemed to come up short in this department, but I bought one anyway. For working with text, the Palm computer offered only the default Memo Pad application; however, each note is limited to 4,000 characters. As I understand it, each note is merely a field in a database. Of course, you can simply create additional notes upon filling one up, then paste them together once you’ve performed a HotSync, but isn’t there a more "elegant" solution? It turns out there is.
.H1 AportisDoc
First there was Doc (now AportisDoc), an ingenious program by Rick Bram that allows you to convert plain-text files of any size to a proprietary format, install them on the Palm organizer, read them, and then (optionally) delete them, thereby reclaiming memory. This was a step in the right direction, but Doc files are read-only — you can’t edit them. A companion program, Doc+, allowed editing but is still available only in a beta format.
.H1 QED
Along comes QED, a shareware program written by Kurt Schuster, which as far as I am concerned is about as close as we’re going to come to a word processor for the Palm device. It handles files of any size (you are limited only by the available memory on your machine, of course), uses the same file format as Doc, employs a mostly standard interface, and easily exchanges documents with your PC. It can’t do word processor-like formatting, but there’s a workaround for that.
.H1 QED’s icon bar
Once you’ve downloaded (from http://www.visionary2000.com/qed/) and installed QED (which occupies less than 13K of your Palm computer’s memory), you can either create a new file or open an existing one, such as those used by Doc or AportisDoc. (This article assumes that you already know how to convert text files to Doc/QED format and install them on your Palm. If not, it’s a relatively simple process of using one of many converter programs.) On-screen icons and standard menus make navigation within QED very simple.
As shown in Figure A, a row of icons appears at the bottom of the QED screen. From the left, the icons (1) create a new document, (2) open an existing document, (3) search for specified text, (4) scroll up, (5) scroll down, (6) scroll left, and (7) scroll right. The rectangular bar allows you to jump to a specified point in the document, and the paper-clip icon at the far right manages bookmarks.
.FIG A A row of icons appears at the bottom of the QED screen. You can also see the Commands menu here.
New documents by default are named "untitled1," "untitled2," and so on. With any document, however, you can select Rename from the Commands menu and give the document a descriptive name. The author says that future versions might allow users to name files as they are created. A word of caution: Document names of eight characters or fewer are best if you plan to use MakeDoc to convert your documents back to text files for use on your PC (more about this later). The DOS-based utility will choke on long filenames.
When you click the Open icon, you’re presented with a list of available documents from which to choose. The first time I used QED, I was momentarily stumped by the large checkmark and the large X at the bottom of the "open" dialog box, mostly because their use is a departure from the standard interface of Pilot applications. Obviously, however, the checkmark is the equivalent of "OK," and the X means "Cancel." Unfortunately, the symbols don’t respond to the GoType! keyboard’s shortcuts for "Done" and "Cancel."
The author has cleverly made five of the icons serve dual functions. Pressing the third icon will search for text, but pressing the icon above the dividing line will initiate a new search, whereas pressing it below the line will search again for the string that was originally entered. Hint: QED will perform this function downward only, so go to the top of the document before initiating a search.
Similarly, pressing the "scroll up" icon above the divider will scroll the text by one line; pressing it below the divider will scroll the text by one page. The equivalent is true of the "scroll down," "scroll left," and "scroll right" icons. Vertical scrolling can also be effected with the hardware buttons.
The rectangular bar contains a "slider" and is a graphical representation of the length of your document. To jump to the top of your file, tap the left end of the bar or drag the slider all the way to the left. To jump to the approximate middle of your file, drag the slider to the center. To move to the end of your file, drag the slider all the way to the right.
The paper-clip icon brings up a small window from which you can manage bookmarks, as shown in Figure B. For example, if you frequently need to return to a specified point in a document, first navigate to that point, then tap the paper clip, then choose Add Bookmark. You’re presented with a dialog box in which to enter the name of the bookmark. Thereafter, pressing the paper clip will show you the bookmark you named along with the default options Add Bookmark, Delete Bookmark, and Scan Bookmarks. Selecting the name of the bookmark you created will take you directly to that point in the file. There’s more about bookmarks below.
.FIG B You can manage Bookmarks with QED.
.H1 QED’s menus
QED has three drop-down menus. As mentioned above, the first is Commands, which offers the menu items Rename, Delete, Info, and About. As already noted, Rename allows you to rename the open document. Delete will remove the open document from the Palm device, at which point it will no longer be available to QED or or AportisDoc, should you have either of those applications installed. Info shows you the name of the file and its size. About provides the version number of the application and the address of the QED web site. As with other Palm device applications, you can access most of the menu commands by making the Grafitti "command" stroke and then entering the letter shown next to the command.
The second menu is Edit, which provides access to the self-explanatory Cut, Copy, Paste, and Undo functions.
.H2 QED Options
The third menu, Options, also has an Options menu item. Selecting it brings up the dialog box shown in Figure C. Here you can control page width, whether or not new documents are created in compressed form, the font size (presently two fonts are available, the same two that are used in Memo Pad), the use (or not) of rules (dotted lines as in Memo Pad), and backup options.
.FIG C You can control some aspects of your document. And check out those funky Check and X buttons.
Another option, Editable, makes the current document read-only. When documents are opened as read-only, you can scroll through them by tapping on the screen, as you do in Doc. The Fscroll option specifies whether the screen scrolls one entire screen at a time or one line less than an entire screen.
The page width is specified in pixels. QED will wrap text at the specified width. Use the value of 160 (the width of the Palm device screen) for working with conventional documents. Use higher values to change the screen to a left/right scrollable virtual width screen, such as for tabular material and source code. Most of the options set in this area of QED are global (i.e., they set program-wide defaults), but each document remembers its page width.
The Register menu item in the Options menu brings up a dialog box in which you enter a registration number after paying for the software, thus making the nag screens go away.
When you select BookChar from the Options menu, you can specify a bookmark search string (up to four bookmark characters, for example, "chap"). This is a little obtuse, but quite powerful. Here’s how it works: if you scan for bookmarks, the letters after "chap" will be used as bookmark names and added to the bookmark list. If, after running this scan, you then change your text, your bookmarks become more and more imprecise, because they are stored as absolute character count offsets from the top of the "file". If you do a Scan Bookmarks operation again, however, the bookmarks markers will be refreshed. The Doc standard bookmark character is the "degree" symbol. Many E-texts come with this character and allow the user to take over these bookmarks.
.H1 Writing, Editing, and Formatting with QED
QED accepts input from Grafitti, the on-screen keyboard, or external keyboards like the GoType! or Newton. CorrectHack (a Hackmaster extension that expands user-defined abbreviations, much as the AutoCorrect feature in Word does) also works with QED.
Once you’ve finished your writing and editing and wish to work with your file on your PC, all you need to do is make sure that Backup is checked in the Options dialog box and then HotSync to your desktop computer. When the HotSync is complete, you should find your file (named yourfile.pdb) in the Backup subfolder of your Pilot directory.
Unfortunately, there’s another step before you can use your file. You’ll need MakeDoc (which can be found at http://pc-28134.on.rogers.wave.ca) to convert your documents back to plain-text files.
MakeDoc is a DOS program and you’ll need to use the following command line:
.BEGIN_CODE
makedoc -d src.pdb dest.txt
.END_CODE
Once you’ve got a converted text file, you can do whatever you wish with it, such as open it in Word, apply formatting, and save it as a Word file.
Note: Here’s a great incentive for registering QED. Registered users of QED are entitled to a copy of QEX, a Windows 95 utility that allows for easier conversion than that available with a DOS utility.
As I noted earlier, QED doesn’t allow formatting, but there’s a way around this, particularly if you work in Microsoft Word. Let’s say you want certain words or characters to be in italic. When working in QED, you might enter such strings with a "plus" sign before and after (e.g., "I read it in the +New York Times+").
After you bring the converted-to-text file into Word, make sure you’re at the top of the document, open the Replace dialog box, check Use Pattern Matching, and then enter "\+*\+" (without the quotes) in the Find What field. In the Replace With field, enter no text but select italic formatting. When you click on Replace all, Word will search for strings that appear between plus signs and apply italic formatting to them. Go back to the top of the document, unselect Use Pattern Matching, click on No Formatting, and replace all plus signs with nothing. If you’re like me and use this method frequently, you’ll want to record it as a macro and then make the macro available as a toolbar button, menu command, or keyboard shortcut. See Word’s Help file for more information.
.H1 Drawbacks
The only real problem I have with QED concerns its method of saving. Like most Palm device applications, QED has no Save command. Once, while I was editing in QED, my Palm organizer crashed (for reasons unrelated to QED), and when I did a soft reset and returned to the program, I found that I had lost a substantial amount of my work. Apparently the only way to avoid having this happen is to exit the program and then return to it, thereby effecting a save. Unfortunately, with large documents this results in a "Wait… compressing" box, during the appearance of which you can’t do much of anything (it’s the equivalent of your Windows cursor’s turning into an hourglass). Sometimes this box will appear on its own, such as when you use the slider bar to navigate through a similarly long document. And, apparently, the only way to avoid seeing this message at all is to work on uncompressed documents, but in doing so you sacrifice memory you might need for other things.
.H1 Summary
QED costs $23.00 and, I believe, is well worth it. In future versions the author plans to add support for categories, a privacy feature, enhanced preferences, two additional fonts, and greater GoType! compatibility.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
QED is available from http://www.visionary2000.com/qed/.
Aportis Doc is available from http://www.aportis.com.
TealDoc is available from http://www.tealpoint.com.
MakeDoc is available from http://pc-28134.on.rogers.wave.ca.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Eric Newman is an editor with IDG Books Worldwide, the author of the "Dallas" FAQ (at http://helius.carroll.com/p/edit/takapa.html), and a cousin of PalmPower contributing editor Bob Freud.
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6c7eb
