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SmartDoc


Thu Apr 13, 2000 - 3:41 PM EDT - By Jack Southworth

Overview

SmartDoc is an excellent utility for editing and reading palm documents. Its simple yet powerful interface makes quick work of editing, and with a third party document converter, it is possible to import and edit Microsoft Word documents on your Visor.

Usability and Features

Ease of use and functionality are the two key facets of every good palm program, and SmartDoc has both of those covered. It packs many helpful features into its simple and immediately understandable interface. The program has four different fonts for viewing documents--normal text, bold normal text, large text and bold large text--and the buttons for changing them are always visible and, therefore, easily accessible. A button on the taskbar allows you to toggle editing on or off, a useful feature for protecting documents from accidental editing. For organization, you may bookmark particular parts of a document and rename and reorder bookmarks that you have already set. Documents can also be put into user-defined categories.

An “Info” button that is always on screen gives data about the current document, lets you change the title of the document and allows you to specify what category a document is in. It also allows you to denote whether or not a document is private, whether or not the document is backed-up on HotSync and if the document is searchable by the built-in global find (silk-screened button).

SmartDoc uncompresses compressed documents on the fly. Compression saves space, but large documents may take a few seconds to appear. You can also compress documents that you have written. The compression process takes a very long time, but the upside is that you save 30-40 percent of memory comparatively. The manual states that compression usually is around 12 kilobytes per minute. Cutting Edge Software recommends that you leave documents uncompressed while you are in the process of editing them, and only compress them when you are ready to distribute them.

The two best functions of SmartDoc are auto-scroll and find and replace. A button on the interface toggles the auto-scrolling on or off. When on, the text scrolls by one line at a time. You are able to set the pace faster or slower by tapping the MemoPad and ToDo buttons. This is a very handy feature for those reading long documents. Find and replace works just as it does in any other document editor. You can type a word to look for and the text to replace it with. Searches can be case-sensitive. Be careful though, replacements cannot be undone.

Documents can be beamed from within SmartDoc to other palm-compatible devices, making it easy to distribute your work. With Internet access, you may also upload and download document files from within SmartDoc. After entering the URL and other pertinent information, SmartDoc will go to the specified URL and download/upload the correct file. It also supports FTP (file transfer protocol).

An interesting feature of SmartDoc is the integration with PalmPrint. PalmPrint ($39.95) allows palm-compatible devices to print to Infrared enabled printers. It is also compatible with the GoType! Keyboard. These abilities really round-out the features packed into this great product.

Requirements

SmartDoc uses approximately 113 kilobytes of memory. This is not bad at all for a program so feature rich.

Conclusion >>

Product Info
Details

»	Name SmartDoc
»	Company Cutting Edge Software
»	Size 113k
»	Fact Sheet & User Opinions

Availability

»	Unknown

Pricing

»	$19.95

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