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CARD TRICKS
Making expansion cards work for you
By Stephen Vance
As a computer consultant, I have a continuous need for documentation close at hand, and most documentation these days comes in Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format). Imagine my anticipation when I bought a Palm m505 and a 64MB MultiMediaCard and downloaded the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Palm OS (at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrmobiledevices.html). Ah, the thought of product documentation and standards specifications in my shirt pocket! Now imagine my frustration and disappointment when there was no obvious way to put this documentation on the memory card.
Here are some tips, tricks, and utilities that make expansion cards work, even for applications that do not fully support them. My advice here focuses on Acrobat Reader, but many of these tips apply to any Palm OS application.
Why some applications don't work
In Palm OS 4.0 (and the Sony CLIE variant of 3.5), Palm introduced the Expansion and Virtual File System Managers to make it easy for programmers to seamlessly handle expansion technologies like Secure Digital (SD) cards, MultiMediaCards (MMC), and the Sony Memory Stick. Applications that use the newer APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) work well with expansion cards. The rest do not.
Palm OS arranges the memory on your expansion cards similarly to that on your PC hard disk. The easy-to-use Palm OS interface makes this knowledge unnecessary until things don't work as expected.
Converting PDFs to PDBs
The simplest solution for Adobe PDFs converts them to Palm PDB (Palm Database) format so that you can use the Palm Install Tool to store them on your expansion card. This requires an additional utility from Adobe and some minor manual intervention.
"You must be sure copy the PDF2PDB executable to your Acrobat Reader for Palm OS install directory."
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First, install Acrobat Reader for Palm OS. Next, go to Adobe's Web site and download the PDF2PDB.EXE utility (at http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?hexID=8a3e). Unfortunately for our Macintosh-using friends, this tool is only available for Windows. Be sure to read and exactly follow the installation instructions for PDF2PDB. In particular, you must be sure copy the executable to your Acrobat Reader for Palm OS install directory.
Now the pieces are in place. Using the Acrobat Reader for Palm OS desktop utility, prepare the PDF files for transfer to the PDA, as shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
 
Prepare a file for transfer with Acrobat Reader for Palm OS. Roll over picture for a larger image.
You will likely encounter several prompts and options in the process. The details are reasonably well discussed in the Adobe documentation and at their support site.
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