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TomeRaider, a very able reference guide browser
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Keep this huge reference work at arm's length
all the time
Be your own tour guide |
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TomeRaider is an excellent text database browser for handheld devices and Windows. On handhelds it is without competition when it comes to efficiently storing, indexing and searching huge files.
TomeRaider is shareware. There are many TomeRaider ebooks and reference guides freely available on the web, some quite impressive, but of course none of those reference works even comes close to Wikipedia.
Platforms
TomeRaider 3 is available for Pocket PC, Palm OS and Windows
TomeRaider 2 is available for Symbian, Psion and Nokia / Sony Ericsson Smart Phones
Speed
TomeRaider speed is phenomenal:- Article retrieval through the index: sub second
- Article retrieval by following a hyperlink: sub second.
- Extremely fast index search. Fast full text search. An index search on my AXIM handheld scans about 10,000 entries per second. A full text search processes about 50 Mb data per minute(= TomeRaider 2, see also below). But that is about as good as it gets given the access speed of my aging compactflash card. There are faster memory cards today.
HTML support
Only on the Windows and Pocket PC platforms TomeRaider provides full HTML support. I actually discovered this accidentally, as it is an undocumented feature. TomeRaider uses the Explorer engine for rendering it pages on these platforms, hence its full set of capabilities.On Palm OS and Epoc/Symbian platforms only a small set of text markup tags was supported in TomeRaider 2. The Palm OS version of TomeRaider 3 extended this set, but it is still not on a par with the PPC version.
My conversion script produces different output for each platform, making the best of each platforms capabilities.
File Size
TomeRaider 2 files for the Palm OS could not exceed 30 Mb, hence the English and German Wikipedia files had to be split into several volumes. This file size restriction has vanished with TomeRaider 3.
New TR3 features
TomeRaider 3 adds these features:- Image support On handhelds images are shown in reduced size, but tapping on the image opens a new window where the image can be zoomed and panned with the pen.
- Category support Show a list of entries that belong to a certain category. Very useful for browsing the Wikipedia.
- Searching is even faster and more versatile Complete content is now indexed, so even a full text search is now done in a flash.
- Even better compression
This does not mean TomeRaider 3 files are substantially smaller than before, it rather means the file size has not grown, even when huge indexes for full text search have been added.
Palm OS specific improvements Many HTML tags are now recognized. However unicode font support and html tables are still missing on the Palm OS platform. File size constraints are a thing of the past now.
See for further details and downloads the TomeRaider site.
Registration
You will need a registration for the handheld version. (The preview version hides every fifth entry).
New databases can only be created with the Windows version. You do not need a registration for this. The preview version will import a new database quite well.