Handling E-books on your Palm is one of the things that Plucker does
well. To create such E-books you first have to get the book in either
text or (preferable) in HTML format -- Project Gutenberg:
http://www.promo.net/pg/
is a good place to find several old classics and other free books.
Some books can be found in the Open E-book (OEB) format. That
format is close enough to HTML to be usable by the parser.
In this example we will convert Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland using a copy in OEB format that we got from
http://www.jeffkirvin.com/writingonyourpalm/recommends.htm. After
unpacking the file in the HTML subdirectory we have one large
OEB file called alices_adventures_in_wonderland.htm and the
procedure to convert this file into a Plucker database is very simple,
% Spider.py -v --no-urlinfo -H plucker:/HTML/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.htm \
> -N "Alice in Wonderland" -f DB/Wonderland
Working for pluckerdir /home/pilot/.plucker
Processing plucker:/HTML/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.htm.
0 collected, 0 still to do
Retrieved ok
Writing out collected data...
Writing db 'Alice in Wonderland' to file /home/pilot/.plucker/DB/Wonderland.pdb
Converted plucker:/HTML/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.htm
Converted plucker:/~parts~/plucker%3a%2fHTML%2fali.....onderland.htm/1
Converted plucker:/~parts~/plucker%3a%2fHTML%2fali.....onderland.htm/2
Converted plucker:/~parts~/plucker%3a%2fHTML%2fali.....onderland.htm/3
Converted plucker:/~parts~/plucker%3a%2fHTML%2fali.....onderland.htm/4
Wrote 1 <= plucker:/~special~/index
Wrote 2 <= plucker:/HTML/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.htm
Wrote 11 <= plucker:/~parts~/plucker%3a%2fHTML%2fali.....onderland.htm/1
Wrote 12 <= plucker:/~parts~/plucker%3a%2fHTML%2fali.....onderland.htm/2
Wrote 13 <= plucker:/~parts~/plucker%3a%2fHTML%2fali.....onderland.htm/3
Wrote 14 <= plucker:/~parts~/plucker%3a%2fHTML%2fali.....onderland.htm/4
Done!
We give it a different name than the database itself and also exclude
the URL info (we don't need that in an E-book). From the output above
you can also see that the document is split into several parts, since
we for internal reasons must keep the text documents below 32 kB in size.
The database can be found in the DB directory,