Fun with my Palm Pilot
House on Red Corner · 2006-08-23
So the other night, I was up until four o’clock installing new programs and learning how to do some pretty neat stuff. One program I installed on my Palm Pilot (Gawd! I love being half a decade behind the bleeding edge of technology!!) is called “Plan My Day.” Basically, it combines the items on my todo list with the Calendar and allows me to organize the order of things. Pretty neat! What it really does is force me to once again sit down in the morning and make some decisions about doing stuff, which will help me to at least feel more productive.
Another thing I have been working on is the capacity to read PDF documents on my Palm. As my university publishes the textbooks which we use in the PDF format and I’d like to be able to do some reading when I’m on the subway this is going to be an important task.
I did some websearches but did not turn up anything that would make this conversion. I did however discover that there is a utility which will convert PDF to text. Ubuntu keeps the Poppler Utilites within its repositories and one of the tools there is called, pdftotext. I love Linux and it’s great naming conventions!
It works like this:
pdftotext ImportantDocument.pdf ImportantDocument.txt
And it’s done!
Then I installed Pyrite Publishing which allows me to turn a text document into a format readable by the Palm Pilot.
pyrpub -P PDBOutput -o ImportantDocument.pdb \ ImportantDocument.txt
And I’m done, all I have to do now is sync the new document into my Palm!!
I am thinking about writing a bash script to one step this process so that it looks something like this:
pdftopdb ImportantDocument.pdf ImportantDocument.pdb
unless someone out there has already done this!
Tags: Ubuntu