Other Plucker Tools, Toys, and Things

Lots of people have written other tools and add-ons which extend the use of Plucker. If you'd like to increase the functionality of Plucker, read some e-books in Plucker format, or try other ways of using Plucker, many of these tools may help. Give them a try, and help us improve all of the projects.

AgendaReader

Agenda Reader is an updated version of Tim Wentford's TWReader, which was ported to the Zaurus and developed beyond it's original features for the Zaurus platform. You can find it at the AgendaReader wiki website.

Vade Mecum

Vade Mecum (pronounced "VAY-dee MEE-cum", which is Latin for "go with me") is the first-ever Plucker document viewer for the Pocket PC. It is a complete redesign and rewrite of the original PalmOS version of the viewer, and includes many features that do not exist in the PalmOS version. Some of these new features are:

• Annotations
• Highlights
• Text selection and copying
• Variable formatting options (font size, margins, interparagraph spacing, paragraph indentation, etc.)

Vade Mecum's primary goal is 100% feature compatibility with the official Plucker viewer, which means it will be able to view any Plucker document that the official viewer can. This project also hopes to support additional file formats, perhaps even rich text and HTML.

This project also contributes to the richness of the Pocket PC platform by providing another means of reading eBooks. There are several other eBook readers available for the Pocket PC, including many free ones, but this one is different from them in that it:

• Reads Plucker documents
• Presents documents in a browser-based paradigm ("document-at-a-time") instead of a book-based paradigm ("page-at-a-time"). This means you can scroll down at your own pace to see more text, instead of having to turn a virtual page to read more text. This helps you keep track of your reading context, and also allows for features like scrollbars and autoscrolling.
• Repositionable bookmarks: easily change the position in the document that a particular bookmark references.

Plucker Electronic Book Archives

Many people have adopted Plucker as a platform for producing high-quality Electronic Books (e-books) to use with Plucker. Here are a few:

Byron Collins' Ebook Archives

Byron Collins has a collection of e-books on his website. He is a regular contributor to the Plucker community with e-book submissions in Plucker format. Download them from his website directly.

Curt-n-Dave's Plucker-book Repository

Visit Curt-n-Dave's e-book repository and download some pluckerbooks from their website.

Memoware

Memoware has a growing collection of Plucker e-books submitted by contributors and users of Plucker. You can search their archives for your favorite titles.

Nick Vargish's Bandersnatch Unpress

Another collection of e-books in Plucker format, from Nick Vargish.

Linux Documentation in Plucker Format

Linux Documentation Project

The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) now releases all of its HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs in Plucker format. They are located under the Additional HOWTO-related items on their site

Third-Party Tools

FlingIt

FlingIt is a tool that allows you to 'fling' webpages you are viewing in your web browser into Plucker. It is developed as part of the Highly Interactive Computing in Education (HICE) project at the University of Michigan. Visit the HICE homepage for additional information.

gut

gut is a program that marks-up Project Gutenberg Etexts to HTML, suitable for reading in any e-book reader that supports HTML, including Plucker. You can visit the gut homepage to download a copy for your own.

JPluck

JPluck is a Java-based toolkit for creating Plucker documents. It includes a GUI application for managing and downloading documents. JPluck will run on any platform that supports the Java 1.4 vm or later, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris. You can download JPluck at the JPluck homepage on SourceForge.

Microsoft Word to Plucker Convertor

If you have Microsoft Word documents on the web that you'd like to convert to Plucker format, doc2pl will allow you to do just that. This tool requires wvWare and a working Plucker installation, and currently will not work on Win32 systems. You may download doc2pl from the Plucker website directly.

PalmFontConv

PalmFontConv is a set of free (GPL) utilities for converting between Palm font formats and for converting other font formats (TrueType, Type 1, BDF, etc.) to Palm formats. There is support for anti-aliased (smoothed) fonts compatible with Plucker. The basic utilities are command-line based, but there is a user-friendly graphical interface for generating Plucker font packages (anti-aliased or non). PalmFontConv can be found at the project homepage on sourceforge.

Plucker Bookmark Assistant

Plucker Bookmark Assistant (pba) is a tool that will convert your Netscape or Mozilla bookmarks to proper HTML format, which you can then pluck with Plucker. You can download pba from the Plucker website directly.

Plucker Email Reflector

Plucker Email Reflector (pler) allows you to use Plucker through email, without having to install any Plucker software on your desktop. To use it, simply send an email to pler@plkr.org with the subject 'Help' to get more information. The power of Plucker, using just email.

RoadLingua

RoadLingua is a product made by AbsoluteWord which allows you to do word lookups or word translations on your Palm or Pocket PC handheld device. They have over 300 multilingual and specialty dictionaries available for download and purchase. You can also create custom dictionaries with their tools. Visit the RoadLingua homepage for more details about their products, and how they integrate with Plucker, to allow you to do word lookups and translations while running Plucker.

Sitescooper

Sitescooper is a tool (written in perl) that allows you to download your favorite websites and convert them into various formats, including Plucker, which you can view on your Palm handheld device. You can visit the Sitescooper homepage to download the version for your OS.