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brian> Still, I can understand (from experience) that it's a real pain to
brian> have put a lot of personal data into applications which have
brian> proprietary file formats. I wish that Palm had included an "export"
brian> function in their apps so that one could more easily get at the
brian> data. Your best bet in that regard might be to use a product like
brian> Intellilink to convert the Palm application data to something
brian> standard like comma-delimited format.
To export ASCII is the easy part. You can either print to PostScript and
distill to ASCII or print to a simple printer (such as dasiy wheel) and
chop off the esc chars. To parse ASCII into your favorite format is left
as an exercise.
The hard part is to input your data into Palm's proprietary format. My
Emacs BBDB has almost a thousand records and I really like to import into
my Zoomer. What I am doing now is to dump out an ASCII file once in a
while and use Palm's free import utility (on Geopublish running under
Linux's DOSemu) to convert to Notebook (130K). At least I can do a text
search w/ notebook. (Intellilink is useless to me unless someone has
successfully got it running under a popular Windows emulator.)
Aonther problem w/ proprietary format is that my Zoomer may very well out
live GEOS, Windows etc. At that point, how do I retrieve my address book?
I know that my source codes, BBDB, LaTeX files etc will survive long after
UNIX dies, because everything is ASCII based and has well documented
format.
Regards,
Rui-Tao Dong ~{6-HpLN~} 2760 Kelvin Ave., #3211
rdong@printrak.com Irvine, CA 92714
(714)752-0855(H)