Plucker is a very useful product that many Palm users use every day. It allows you to download/spider web sites with your desktop and view them later while on the go(without network connection; the data gets compressed). I have used Palm handhelds for ages and thus have a huge library of Plucker documents – thus, I was very delighted to see Vade Mecum aka Plucker Viewer for Palm OS.
Installing Vade Mecum 0.6.3 onto my HP ipaq rx4240 was easy. The machine gladly accepted the .cab file available from SourceForge, although it bickered a bit about how the program may malfunction as it was written for an older version of Windows Mobile:
Opening my sample Plucker file(4MB, compressed, text and images) worked well – here’s a screenshot of the home page of the file:
Complex text formatting and images/tables were handled like Plucker Viewer would handle them on a Palm OS device – even rather complex tables couldn’t stop Vade Mecum’s rendering engine:
Vade Mecum can search the contents of the open document:
Vade Mecum’s rendering engine supports various fonts and font sizes, ClearType support is available, too. The images below show two different renditions of the same file, one with a very small and one with a very big font size:
Plucker documents can be stored all over your PocketPC – as long as you tell Vade Mecum where to look for them:
Last but not least, I tried version 0.6.6.5(experimental). This version is said to have a few improvements to font rendering, and it indeed works quite a bit faster. However, its rendering engine is severely flawed, my sample Plucker document became unusable(links didn’t work):
Overall, viewing Plucker documents on a PocketPC is possible and works well. While Vade Mecum definitely isn’t perfect(speed, lack of landscape mode support), the program handled my sample plucker document very well(no crashes, all links usable, clean rendering). Plucker is no longer a reason to stick to Palm OS – PocketPC’s can view Plucker documents, too!
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