Re: [NTLK] Paperback or Newton Press - creating large books

From: DJ Vollkasko (DJ_Vollkasko_at_gmx.net)
Date: Wed Apr 21 2004 - 10:15:44 PDT


>I'm trying to get Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" onto my Newton
>for bedtime reading. When I run a plain text version of it
>through Paperback 2 (my preferred format), the Newton takes about
>5 minutes to open the resulting package, and then says it has
>insufficient memory to turn the page. I don't think the book is
>too big for the Newton to handle, because I just read Mark
>Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" in Paperback format, and it was
>even bigger than the Lessig book. Any ideas what I might be doing
>wrong?

Hmh... Maybe you have too many active packages on your Newton. As far as I
understand this heap-thing, every package on any store uses up some heap.
Take a large storage card, fill 'er up with apps and books, and you loose
heap without a single package actually running (besides backdrop-app, of
course).

Recommended fix: Freeze any packages not in use.
Recommended app: ICS NewtCase's Extension Manager 3.1
(http://www.newts.com/newton/nc30.html).

You'll see the difference in the time rebooting and mounting all stores takes
- after a reboot, NOS mounts (or whatevers) everything it can find. Inactive
packages (aka frozen) aren't found, so no time spent on mounting
(whatevering) them.

The NewtCase suite is pretty powerful, I haven't really gotten it all
figured out yet, but what my Extension Manager will do once I read the
manual will be all these things:

-- Adds Freeze/Thaw entry to Extras' action button menu. (Note: many tiny
freeware freezers offer this, too.)
-- Allows to freeze/thaw all packages
-- Allows creating "sets" of packages to be frozen and thawed together.
-- Any package can be a member of several sets (I think).
-- Allows creating icon for set (like an Alias in MacOS-speak).
-- Configure icon to freeze/thaw/reverse set.
-- Directly tapping a frozen package (e.g. a book) automagically thaws
(activates) it. Close the package, and it'll be refrozen. This is really
nice.
-- Choose (frozen) key packages for sets that when started thaw other stuff,
too, and will refreeze itself and the other packages again when closing.
-- Create sets to be automatically started after reboot.
-- Create sets to be automatically started after wakeup.

With this you could have an icon "Web Browser" which unfreezes your fave
webbrowser plus all the communications packages and drivers required. After
your done, another tap on the icon freezes the whole bundle again. - Nice
e.g. for various communications packages that don't need to be running all
the time, or your GPS app plus all installed maps, no need to waste heap on
them as long as you don't need them.

And then there's a lot of other cool stuff in NewtCase - GestureLaunch,
SoupKitchen, the brilliant SleepAid (love it!), QuickPicker (something like
Eckhart's SmallExtras http://www.40hz.org/SmallExtras but with different
strenghts - e.g. the power to launch books... ;=} Also allows to switch menu
to large + bold font and a wider menu display)... Really a nice suite that
makes a Newtonian's live easier! (actually so nice, I've blown up this blab
a bit and put it up on the Wiki
http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/index.php/NewtCase - additional comments
welcome!).

Q: What are Tom Collins and Dan Rowley of ICS doing these days? Is Dan still
at Landware?

>I tried using Newton Press 1.1 from a Mac Word 5.1 version of the
>same book, but it would only create a 1-page book. Anybody ever
>run into this glitch? Again, I've made bigger documents with
>Newton Press that worked fine, and I don't know what I'm doing
>differently this time.

Maybe a case of software rot? ;=}

Honestly, I'm having issues myself with my previously nicely working NP 1.1
in Win98. I can drag and drop a formatted rtf-file to it (and it keeps all
font size, font choices and page breaks, yay!), save everything as
.np!-File, BUT NP suddenly won't create packages from it.
   Checking the source .np!-files on a different computer shows they are
perfectly okay, so it's gotta be something about the Newton Press app.
Funny, didn't change anything on that box in quite a while, so what may have
caused this... no clue.

Cheers,

DJV.

-- 
This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries
Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/


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