[GLLUG] nook ereader and sheet music

[Richard Houser]

> I agree.  Castrated devices aren't worth having.  The question that arises is
> which, if any of them is a general purpose device?
>
> I want to be able to read 1) ascii, 2) postscript, 3) PDFs, 4) html, 5) MS
> Word, 6) RTF, 7) .LIT files, 8) LaTex
>
> Other possibilities might be 9) word star, 10) word perfect
>
> Whats out there that can do most of these? I'd say that 1 to 6 are really
> important.

I completely agree with the majority here, except 5 and 6 are not
standards and contain massive incompatibilities between versions,
often undocumented.  I don't see the value of supporting either of
them in a device (after all, Microsoft intentionally breaks
compatibility even on it's own product line), and I suspect #7 is
similar, being another MS format.  Long term, compatibility with those
formats will break, so it's better to avoid them from the start.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a way to get the data out of a doc
file, just that such a capability should be an external tool to
convert the non-standard formats into a supported standard one.  It's
a heck of a lot lower development cost to proceed this way, too.

In fact, I don't see the point of handheld readers supporting any of
the word processing formats at this point other than ODF (5,6,9,10).
Similarly, wouldn't LaTex be better suited to create a source SMGL or
PDF rather than rendered natively?  Postscript is also similarly
overkill for a handheld and easily converted to PDF.

So, I guess my list would be 1) (X)HTML, 2) ODF, 3) PDF, 4) raw image
formats like TIFF, JPEG, PNG.


In any case, take that device back if you can.