David A. Wheeler's Plucker Files

This area is a collection of various useful documents in "Plucker" format that I've created. Plucker is an open source software / free software offline reader of HTML files for PalmOS; if you have a Palm, you need this program. Be sure to also install the "Zlib" library, as described at the Plucker website.

I've created a few documents in Plucker format for myself, and I thought that others might want them too. Plucker all by itself does a reasonable job of converting documents to a small screen, but sometimes you can get a better result through a few simple knowledgeable tweaks; you may find the ones I had to tweak especially helpful.

So, here are some useful Plucker documents:

• The W3C's HTML 4.01 Specification (333KiB).
• Red Hat Linux 7.3 Documentation (1.2MiB). This is a collection of the key top-level documentation that comes with Red Hat Linux, including the installation guide, the getting started guide, customization guide, reference guide, and maximum RPM (the book that describes the RPM tool that manages Red Hat systems). The license permits non-paper redistribution; see the documentation for more details. This was created simply by slipping in the documentation CD-ROM and typing:

   plucker-build -v --stayonhost -M9999 --noimages --zlib-compression \
           -H /mnt/cdrom/RH-DOCS/index-en.html -f redhatdocs \
           -N "Red Hat Linux Documentation"
  

• The Jargon File (1.3 MiB). I created this Plucker version of the Jargon file by downloading the installable HTML tarfile from http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/download.html. After extracting, I cd'ed into the "html" subdirectory, and edited the index.html file so that it didn't reference the "frame" version. Unfortunately, its alternate text doesn't include spaces. Thus, I then created the file using:

   perl -pi -e 's/alt=Next/alt="Next "/g;' \
        -e 's/alt=Previous/alt="Previous "/g;' -e 's/alt=Up/alt="Up "/g;' \
        -- *.html
   plucker-build --quiet --stayonhost -M9999 --noimages --zlib-compression \
           -H /home/dwheeler/temp/jargon-4.3.1/html/index.html -f jargonfile \
           -N "The Jargon File (New Hacker's Dictionary)"
  

Enjoy! If you like, feel free to see my home page.