02/26/01

bibelot.pl

# Copyright (C) 2000 John Fulmer <jfulmer@appin.org>
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
# of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# A full copy of the GNU Public License may be found at:
#
# http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html or in the file 'COPYING' included
# in this package.



bibelot.pl is a Perl5 script that formats and converts text documents into 
compressed PalmDoc .pdb files, suitable for reading on a Palm or Handspring 
device with any standard PalmDoc reader (AportisDoc, CSpotRun, RichReader, 
TealDoc, etc.). It supports STDIN/STDOUT in addition to specifying filenames 
on the command line, dynamically generated title and chapter bookmarks for 
Project Gutenberg (http://www.promo.net/pg) etexts, and should run on any 
platform with Perl5 installed, no additional Perl modules required.  

Bibelot is hosted by Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bibelot

Bibelot was written using documentation and structures borrowed
from Paul J. Lucas' 'txt2pdbdoc' (http://www.best.com/~pjl/software.html)
and documentation from the Pyrite website
(http://www.pyrite.org/etext/format.html). Also, 'pdbdump' was invaluable in
troubleshooting format problems.

Some of the header structures were borrowed, but the programming is my fault.
If it breaks, you keep both pieces...but let me know about it. I'm especially 
interested in formatting problems, and trying to track down all the different 
cases I can. Please report ANY problems you come across, m'kay?

Oh, and what is a 'bibelot'?
See http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=bibelot or your nearest
dictionary.


INSTALLATION
------------

Nothing fancy. Just copy bibelot.pl to any place on your PATH (I use 
/usr/local/bin, myself), and make sure the first line of the script matches 
the location of your 'perl' binary.


CHANGELOG
---------

Changes are documented at the beginning of the bibelot.pl script.


USAGE
-----

bibelot.pl [OPTIONS] <infile> <outfile>

options:
	-h		this message
	-c		turn file compression OFF
	-v		verbose
	-t "name"	document title
	-f		don't format text
	-l<n>		force line width to <n> bytes
	-g		Enable 'Project Gutenberg' mode
	-b		Enable Dynamic Bookmark mode
	-d		Turn off hyphen correction
	-s		Turn off 'smart' format
	-o<n>		Offset for 'smart' format (default '20')

Use '-' or omit filenames to indicate STDIN or STDOUT.



COMPATIBILITY
-------------

If you have a version of perl5 that doesn't like bibelot, please let me know. It
has only been tested on the linux and Win32 (ActiveState) platforms, and much
of bibelot may not be portable.


Files genereted by bibelot has been tested or reported to work with the 
following PalmDoc readers:

Aportis Doc 
ZDoc 
CSpotRun 
RichReader 
QED
MobiPocket Reader

If you know of any other PalmDoc readers that work, please let me know.



jf, 2001
