Curling up with a good book and the H/PC

By David M. Dolan

More and more books are becoming available in “electronic” format (see below, Project Gutenberg ). The simplest of these are no more than ASCII text files, easy to load on a computer and read in a word processor. But most word processors are designed for spell checking, text editing and formatting. If all you want to do is view text, they have all sorts of features you don’t need, and lack a few that you do need.

A dedicated text viewer gives you immediate access to your "electronic novel," using the largest screen area possible with a minimum of screen distractions. Furthermore, most text readers allow you to switch easily to a vertical reader mode, which provides more viewable text per page (because the blank lines used as paragraph separators take less space) and, for many, is easier on the eyes.

Handheld PCs, with their hi-resolution backlit screens, long battery life, and portability, have the ideal hardware for a useful book viewer. Now, with the Bookworm text viewer by Chris Marriot, they also have the software.

Easy to install and use

Bookworm comes in the form of an installer program, BOOKWORM.EXE. First, copy it to your Windows 95 PC and run it from the Start Menu or Windows Explorer. It creates a setup directory with the necessary files on your Windows 95 computer. Next, connect your H/PC to your Windows 95 PC and run HPC Explorer. Finally, double-click on SETUP.EXE in the newly-created setup directory on your desktop PC; this installs the program in the H/PC Windows folder and creates a Bookworm shortcut icon on the H/PC desktop.

Double click on the Bookworm shortcut on your H/PC desktop, tap on File, Open, and select the document you want to view. (The author warns against trying to open anything other than a plain-text file, but, for interest sake, I tried opening a Pocket Word document file and a binary program file, and the program didn't hang.)

The text may be viewed horizontally or vertically using any font available on the H/PC. The text may be scrolled continuously at a speed you select from the Tools Menu. You can also “turn pages” using the <PgUp> or <PgDn> keys. Accessing the <PgUp> and <PgDn> functions requires pressing a key combination on most handheld PCs. (For example, PageUp on the HP 320LX is accessed by pressing <ALT> <UpArrow>). The author thoughtfully provides alternate keys for these functions: <Enter> substitutes for PgDn and <Tab> for PgUp.

The Bookmarks selection in the Tools Menu lets you place any number of bookmarks in the text, each with its own descriptive name. The Goto selection in the View Menu provides a Location Slider that can place you anywhere sequentially in the text. The Find selection, also in the View Menu, allows a search for whole words or segments within words on an either case-specific or ignore-case basis.

Likes, Dislikes, Recommendations

Bookworm provides a simple, clean, and intuitive user interface. Anyone should be able to use it in minutes. I recommend that you use a memory card to hold your text files; the average novel occupies 400k of memory or more. The few suggestions I have for improving the program in no way detract from my high opinion of the quality and usefulness of the program. The instructions provided in a README file could easily be incorporated in the online Help feature, which, at present, consists only of the Keyboard Commands. In the vertical viewing mode, I would like to see more intuitive keys used for the up and down scrolling. When viewing text vertically; <Enter> is at the top of the text but is used to scroll down. Finally, it would save precious main memory if there was an option to setup the program on a memory card. On the whole, however, make no mistake: this is an excellent, must-have program.

WindowsCE Webring