DOS read - small program for reading long texts on the HP200LX


Description

Since I carry my HP200LX almost everywhere I go, I started to load it up with all kinds of digital texts - RFC documents, e-texts, essays downloaded from the net and converted from HTML to plain text. First I used vertical reader to read them, but the short line lengths were not exactly to my liking. Since I already had the C Compiler at hand I got busy. The result is a program to read long texts on the HP200LX. It displays 23 lines of text followed by a status bar containing: Upon start, the file is read completely to determine page break positions (one page == 23 lines) and build an in-memory index of them. Then the first page is loaded and displayed. Operation is pretty straighforward: I find the subshell feature particularly useful, since I can just suspend the read program, do something else and return later. When suspended, the program uses around 65 KBytes of DOS memory. It uses the HP200LX graphics routines for the display to get very fast screen operations (< 1 second for screen refresh). The program easily deals with large files - I've read textfiles up 1.5 MByte size with it, just the initial reading of the file (for determining the page marks) takes a bit of time.

License

This software is distributed unter the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Thanks

Thanks to Gilles for the PAL, the Palm Application Library which I used in this program (graphics routines, parts of the user interface) to make things easier.

Download

The download archive contains both the C source and the DOS executable.

History


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Last modified 2003-04-28 by Alexander Schreiber