Saturday, April 29

Why and how this converter removes line breaks

On a large screen, line breaks are not a problem really, except they reduce the width of the text.

These line breaks can be shown as paragraph marker symbols as in this image:

To put the same text onto a handheld computer, the width has to be made even smaller as in the next image. If there are manual line breaks, the text is then broken in too many places, both automatically and manually. It may look like this:

or like this.
When the manual line breaks are removed, the lines break or wrap only automatically with the smaller width.
The converter then adds html tags so that the page can be read as a web page. This allows a program such as Sunrise Desktop to convert the text, without additional line breaks, into a format which can be displayed by Plucker (installed through Sunrise) on your handheld computer's small screen.

Monday, April 3

Treo online international

If you need to use a Treo as a computer but not as a telephone (but with the capability to receive calls and if necessary make them) find a pre-paid arrangement with a telephone provider. Avoid post-paid plans.
One company in Australia offers a year's access for $A30 including occasional calls and occasional data downloads, such as webmail retrieval or sending. This much won't last long if used often, but suits occasional use. Similar deals can be found in other countries.
When travelling internationally, buy a new prepaid card for each country as global roaming charges are far too high.
If travelling within one country, a post paid plan can offer what you need if accessing internet and email regularly. Beware that providers only provide access to their own email accounts so you may have to use internet mail if you have separate providers (see update below for correction). Retrieving your bigpond email from a vodafone server usually will not work.
Update:
Accessing your email is in fact possible from an internet connection using any server. It is necessary to set up your email client for authentification of out-going mail. This is usually done by checking a box which says something like "server requires authentification" in the out-going mail server settings. ISPs may not require this for the email of users of their own network, but when accessing other networks the user name and password has to be given again.