Large-print notes on EPOC or Symbian

ASCII text

1. a Lua script notesorg.lua - save it as notesorg.lua in C:\System and download the Macro5 macro that uses it (see comments at the start of this for setup instructions).  You will need Macro5 and the Lua 5 OPL kit (C:\Lua5 is not necessary).
2. the older, Python 2 version notesorg.py (see comments at the start of the script for usage)---you need epocpython 2.1 (mirrored here due to increasing accessibility issues on SourceForge download pages) and Macro5.

Reading (and non-ASCII)

Smaller amounts of text can simply be placed in the built-in "Word" app for reading, especially on the larger machines.

Besides ASCII, the Psion also supports characters from the "Code Page 1252" set, which includes curved quotes, em-dash, bullet, section and paragraph symbols, and accented letters for Western European languages---use iconv -c -f UTF8 -t CP1252//TRANSLIT to convert in from UTF-8, and iconv -f CP1252 -t UTF8 to convert back (you might then like to run diff -u to check which characters were lost, unless you want to do without the -c and get error messages).

Another "ex-Shareware" program that now has a universal registration code is Neuon nConvert. A full installation is quite large (~1M), but it can be installed to a CF card if you have one. nConvert can import RTF with basic formatting (bold, italic, underline and size), but if the RTF contains Unicode markup then it's reported as "corrupt" and not converted at all. LibreOffice includes Unicode in RTF export, but if you can make a CP1252-encoded LaTeX file and put \usepackage[raw]{inputenc} in its preamble, you can then use latex2rtf to create an RTF file that nConvert should be able to open. When using this method, LaTeX-style quotes are correctly converted to CP1252 quotes, but em-dashes are dropped, so it's better to use UTF-8 em-dashes and convert to CP1252 code 151 instead of using the standard LaTeX representation. To work around a bug in latex2rtf that ends paragraphs at the first outermost right-brace, simply add a pair of braces around each paragraph (this can be after the initial \raggedright, which is recommended for large-print use).

Large clock

PROC m:
  gAt gWidth/2-120,gHeight/2-20
  gClock on,11,0,"%H%:1%T%:2%S",268436072,9
  get
ENDP

Graphical slides

• The scripts on my preparing enlarged lesson notes with Unix tools page can help generate the unusual page sizes, and if using TeX you can optimise for the display's DPI by adding -D 100 or whatever to the dvips command, and in teTeX 2 use

  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

  to ensure it uses bitmaps not outlines.
• You can also use a desktop application to print to PDF with a custom paper size that corresponds with the device's screen size.  If your application crashes when setting a custom paper size, try using normal A4 paper and set left and bottom margins to 0 and top and right margins to 297mm-H and 210mm-W respectively (where H and W are the height and width of the device); the converter to MBM (below) will then crop the page automatically.  If your application cannot print with large fonts, divide the paper size by the zoom factor you want, and pass this zoom factor as an extra parameter to tex2mbm.py (below).  For example:

  Zoom factor	A4 top,right margins (mm) for		Command
  	Series 7	Revo
  1.5	215.67, 101.33	271.67, 133.33	tex2mbm.py 1.5 file.pdf
  1.7	225.24, 114.12	274.65, 142.35	tex2mbm.py 1.7 file.pdf
  2	236, 128.5	278, 152.5	tex2mbm.py 2 file.pdf
  3	256.33, 155.67	284.33, 171.67	tex2mbm.py 3 file.pdf

  Remember that the above measurements are for A4 size, not Letter size.

pdftops myfile.pdf
ps2ps myfile.ps myfile-2.ps
ps2pdf12 myfile-2.ps

Using the MBM format

Converting LaTeX Output to MBM Fonts

The script to run on the Unix box is tex2mbm.py (as above).  It requires latex-papersize.py (version 1.4 or later), and it requires Symbian's Bmconv.exe (and Wine, unless you're on Cygwin in which case you may have difficulty with some of the more specialist TeX packages).  It also requires netpbm, GhostScript, and of course TeX (although if your most powerful system doesn't have a full TeX installation then it's possible to run TeX on one system and the rest on another by setting a variable, and it's also possible to separate the Mbmconv part from the rest of the processing).

The OPL program to view the results is MbmShow as above (see comments at the start for setup).  It will prompt for a document number (unless you passed only one document to tex2mbm.py) and will then show it; press any key to go forwards or Escape to go backwards.  If you press Escape in the document-number dialogue, MbmShow will prompt for an MBM file to view instead.

Faster version of tex2mbm.py

MBM-like approach on other devices