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Originally Posted by GntlmnBndt
Depends on which "Palm" format you are talking about. Sounds like you are talking about what many call PalmDoc or just DOC, which is actually AportisDoc format. People think it is a subset of Mobi (or iSilo, or TealDoc, or...) because virtually all the Palm ebook readers, including Mobi, could also read AportisDoc files. The format was compressed, but only displayed plain text, so there were several other formats that added various features, but DOC files were a reliable fallback. Several formats were actually extensions of AportisDoc, but I do not know if Mobi is one of them.
The only document format that actually carried the "Palm" name though was Palm Reader, renamed to eReader after Palm sold it. Mobipocket software cannot read eReader files.
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There are an assortment of Palm formats.
The Palm DOC file is a plain ASCII text file, compressed with a variant of RLE compression to save space in RAM. It was developed by Aportis back in the days when Palm devices didn't have expansion cards, and might have 8MB of RAM or less to hold the OS, programs,
and data. Aportis went out of business long ago, but the format was reverse engineered, and most viewers for OS display it as well as their "native" format.
There is a newer format called zTXT that is also plain text, but uses a Palm shared library port of Zlib to provide gzip compatible compression.
The first reader for Palm devices to support things like fonts, color, text attributes, links, and embedded images was Peanut Reader, created by Peanut Press, an early ebook publisher targeting Palm device. Peanut Reader used a format called PML (Peanut Markup Language). Palm bought them and made them the Palm Digital Media division, and called the reader PalmReader.
Palm subsequently sold the Digital Media division to Motricity, a provider of mobile content solutions, who called it eReader, and Motricity in turn sold it to Fictionwise who have retained that name. There have been cosmetic changes in the reader over the years, but no change in the PML format. If you have an old copy of Peanut Reader on a Palm device, it should display any eReader title.
MobiPocket has a version of the viewer for Palm devices.
Other formats also exist, such as TomeRaider (noted for
large file support: there is a cut down version of Wikipedia for TomeRaider on Palm OS), and the Plucker format used by the open source Plucker offline HTML reader for Palm OS. (I have about 3,200 volumes in Plucker format.)
Anything in RAM on a Palm device must be in Palm Database format. Palm files will all have a PDB or PRC extension. The extension is not used by the viewers to identify files. Instead, all Palm Databases have a database header, with a Creator ID and a file Type, and applications look for matching Creator IDs to know what files they own and can process.
Palm programs also exist to handle PDF files, RTF files, and Word documents, though conversion to the internal form used by the program on the device may be required.
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Dennis