HTML-Viewer (Help File)

Post here to share useful tips and tricks, to ask questions about using your DM42 or to report software-related problems
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deetee
Posts: 54
Joined: Mon Jul 22, 2019 8:01 am
Location: Vienna

HTML-Viewer (Help File)

Post by deetee »

Hi all!

Someone explains the DM42 to younger people as "smartphone without phone". I'm interested in any further use of the DM42 even if a smartphone does it better.

The DM42 has an excellent but undocumented HTML-File-Viewer, which can be used to view own content (cheat sheets, e-books, web-content ...). All discussion regarding this topic I found was in viewtopic.php?t=1902.

It seems that the file name has to be in the HELP directory and named "dm42help.htm". Links inside this document are allowed but not outside :-(. Some features (simple tables, text with black or gray background, bold text, italic text, superscript text but not subscript) and special characters (ie non breaking space, angle sign, gray block) are possible.

So I tried to modify (simplify and extend) the help file (which surely was not intendet by the inventor) with all features I found. Thanks in advance for any completion.

To edit the file I recommend an editor which can handle line feeds (Unix LF and not Windows CR+LF). The later one confuses the DM42-html-viewer when representing line breaks.

dm42help.zip
(15.78 KiB) Downloaded 271 times

Regards
deetee
Thomas Okken
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Joined: Tue May 02, 2017 5:48 pm
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Re: HTML-Viewer (Help File)

Post by Thomas Okken »

deetee wrote:
Wed Aug 14, 2019 9:12 am
"smartphone without phone"
To me, the classic "smartphone without the phone part" is the iPod touch. Steve Jobs conceived of it as a product that would appeal to people who found the iPhone too expensive, and lure them into the iOS ecosystem anyway.

It worked on me. I got one, the second-generation model, intending to use it mainly as a convenient Wikipedia reader, and a few months later, it replaced the Palm Z22 PDA I had been using, which itself was the fourth Palm device I had used, after the m100, Tungsten E, and Zire 21.

The essential innovation of the iPod touch compared to a PDA was that you operated the touchscreen with your bare fingers instead of using a metal or plastic stylus. This may seem like a minor change from a hardware or even software perspective, but the change in terms of user interface design was profound, and it improved the ease of use of the devices a lot, by making it possible to use them one-handed.

The DM42, having a full-size calculator keyboard, is a very different animal. Even if it were to run Android instead of SwissMicros' own OS, I don't think many people would think of it as a smartphone-like device. The hardware makes it a calculator or portable data-entry device, that's simply what the form factor makes it naturally good at.
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