Scripts to convert files to/from Palm's PDB format

Jun 27, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: tangawk

I often like to read and edit documents, articles, and papers on my Palm device (using the excellent QED), and then continue back at home on the Mac. This requires quick and easy inter-conversion from .txt to .pdb. In addition, for reading PDFs as text, the conversion must respect the column flow in multi-column PDF fliles (or else you end up reading across, rather than down, the columns in your text file).

This is how to create AppleScript droplets to convert text, PDF, and Word documents to .pdb and then back to text.

  1. Read and follow this excellent hint for converting text to pdb for Palm OS. Make sure during this you pay attention to: In fact, to use these droplets, you don't need to get the AppleScript on the above site to work (just compile xpdf and text2pdb), but it is very useful so I'd do it anyway.
  2. Use the following scripts to do your conversions...
[robg adds: I haven't tested these scripts, and any errors are probably a result of my bad work with cut-and-paste...]

The Scripts:

So now follow the other scripts for other tasks. Again, replace my path:
Users/tangawk/Desktop/pending_junk/boks
with your own in each script, then keep all the saved applets there so you can drag and drop to convert at will! If there are any slick scripters out there who can tidy this code up, I'd love to hear from them, but they work great in their current mode. Hope they're useful to others!

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