[radleyp]

Talk about "misleading", Hacker! Your 6th paragraph mentions all these features that are supposedly present in Plucker but not in iSilo. In fact, with the exception of "annotation" and "transliteration" (not sure about that one, since I don't know what you mean, are you talking about spelling non-latin alphabets in Latin?) they are all in iSilo, along with many other features. I have found Plucker and JPlucker to be unsatisfactory: I never could get the latter to work right, and as a reader iSilo is much better, with its really smooth scrolling and its large choice of fonts. I would love to use the Plucker you are describing, but I have not found it. Philippe Radley

Originally Posted by hacker

As a long-time user, contributor, and supporter of Plucker, I liked the review, however... it is very misleading in many places.

For one, Plucker Desktop is not Plucker. Spaghetti Sauce is not Spaghetti.

The dithering down of images happens because of a Palm limitation, not a Plucker limitation. It is also activated in Plucker Desktop, not Plucker itself (the viewer). I regularly have ENORMOUS images in Plucker, on my Palm, consisting of thousands of colors, with full-size alternate versions, without any "pixelated" dithering. I don't use Plucker Desktop, however, to create them. Nor do I use JPluck.

The 32k boundary is also a Palm limitation, not a Plucker limitation. We can get around it (and we have, if you try any of the last few stable release versions) with the stitching of pages together into one stream.

There were a few other misnomers in the review, which I will probably comment on later, but Plucker far supercedes iSilo in features and capabilities, but that is a given. Where we fall slightly behind, is in the sort of things that Palm devices and Palmsource forbid us from supporting (DIA is one example, we can't add support for the virtual graffiti area on Tungsten T3 devices, because the license to implement the code hooks specifically forbids use in any Free Software project).

We have full VFS support, advanced search, multiple documents that can be put in different categories, sorted, bookmarks, autoscroll, export to memo, dictionary word lookup, preferences, keyboard/graffiti handling, annotation, transliteration, advanced table handling (such as multiple images in a table cell), and a slew of other features that aren't present or available in iSilo. Additionally, we are free, and our doucment format is open and available to anyone wishing to contribute to supporting or improving it.

Many commercial companies have moved over to using Plucker over iSilo for this reason. They can't risk the "one-developer" path, and having no access to the source code, means they are stuck in a bottle. With Plucker, they have the flexibility to do whatever they wish with it (as long as they adhere to the license of course; we've nailed companies in the past who have violated that license).

But then again, we're not competing with iSilo, and they certainly aren't competing with us.