Here is the OpieReader FAQ
Why does my pdb file contain so much garbage?
What can I do about those squares in my text?
Why can't I see any bold or italic text?
Why does OpieReader crash or hang?
The pdb file extension is used for a huge variety of formats many of which aren't even text formats. Many of these formats are proprietary with no published specification. QTRreader is not able to read these proprietary formats.
As a rough guideline, if the file you are trying to read comes from a site which sells its own software then the format is almost certainly proprietary.
An exception to this is Plucker. Plucker is an open format but supports a lot more features than any of the other open formats. OpieReader is currently being enhanced so that it can support these features and then a decoder for Plucker format will be added.
This can also happen when you are trying to read text which is in a different encoding to that selected from the encoding menu.
The squares are characters which are in your text but not in your font. There are two things you can do.
Not all fonts on the Zaurus support bold and italic. For example, on my Zaurus only smoothtimes and helvetica support bold, and only helvetica supports italic. Therefore, when I want to see richly formatted text I use the set font function to view my text with helvetica.
I've tried to make OpieReader reasonably robust without crippling performance by unnecessary error checking code but there are some circumstances which may still cause problems.
OpieReader has to have some sort of understanding of the layout of the text it is showing to produce text nicely laid out on the screen. In word mode OpieReader looks for spaces to delimit words and end of line marks (or <p> in html) to delimit paragraphs. If your text doesn't have this sort of layout then OpieReader can spend a long time looking for them - and it is even possible to run out of memory and/or crash in some circumstances.
Fortunately most text isn't this pathological but if you open a binary file, or if you use the wrong encoding (which makes the file look like a binary file) OpieReader is likely to struggle. Another big problem is selecting the html filter for non-html text. Paragraphs are marked with <p> in html and you don't get many <p>'s in normal text 8^). If you really want to read an html file it is best to distil it to Plucker format first.
If you are unsure about the encoding of a file, or whether or not the file is really in a format which OpieReader understands or you think that words may not be delimited by spaces (e.g. a Japanese text) then select ideogram mode before opening it. This mode turns off a lot of the layout and prevents OpieReader from searching so hard for spaces and end of line marks. However, even in this mode OpieReader may look for end of line marks when doing page/line up so don't scroll up the text until you are sure you have the right encoding.
The 8-bit encodings are mostly compatible i.e. if your document is in one of palm/ascii/Windows(1252) encodings then choosing a different one from palm/ascii/utf-8/Windows(1252) is unlikely to cause problems but any other mismatch is likely to be problematical.
Another cause of crashing is if you have used more than one version of OpieReader and haven't removed the old bookmark files before installing the new version. The version numbers help to indicate compatibility. For example, version 0_3g is not compatible with version 0_4g. OTOH version 0_4a is compatible with version 0_4g. That is the numbers indicate compatibility whilst the letters indicate improved but compatible versions. Providing you are upgrading from a version greater than 4, OpieReader automatically converts the bookmarks but you need to select the right version from the requestor which pops up when OpieReader comes across an older version file.
You can remove bookmarks using the Tidy function.
Send me a description of what you were doing at the time and what the effect was. You should also let me know which version of OpieReader you were using by looking in file/info.
If you are able to, please also send me a copy of your configuration file (/home/root/Settings/reader.conf) and of the file you were trying to read.
Bug reports should be sent to timwentford@hotmail.com
Feature requests should be sent to tim at timwentford dot uklinux dot net unless they have any attachments. Use the hotmail address if you need to accompany a feature request with an attachment.
If you don't get a reply within a few days then send me a reminder containing only the text of your message to the uklinux address.