Saturday, November 1, 2003

Converting Pictures for PDAs -- 8:26 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Sadly, unless you use a memory card, you have to use proprietary Windows software to convert pictures so you can view them on your PalmOS PDA. Thanks to a program called Par, I can convert jpgs into file stream databases that can be uploaded into the PDA's main memory and viewed via SplashPhoto or some other Palm image viewer. Par is powerful, but obtuse. To save you a few brain cells, here's the command I used to convert a file called "LOGOS2.jpg". I managed to view it via SplashPhoto just fine:

par c -a "stream" LOGOS2.jpg.pdb LOGOS2.jpg Foto Foto LOGOS2.jpg

The "c" argument creates the database, -a "stream" makes it a file stream, LOGOS2.jpg.pdb is the filename it creates, LOGOS2.jpg is the name as it will appear on the PDA (SplashPhoto needs the .jpg extension), Foto is the file type, the second Foto is the creator id, and finally LOGOS2.jpg is the file to turn into a database.

It may not be the prettiest thing in the world, but anything that allows me to avoid using Windows makes me one happy guy.

UPDATE! I also created a quick and dirty bash script so I don't have to remember all of this. I called it jpg2pdb.sh. All it does is take whatever filename you pass to it and convert it. It does no sanity checking at all, so don't try anything crazy with it other than converting jpgs. Here it is:

#!/bin/sh
par c -a "stream" "$1".pdb "$1" Foto Foto "$1"

News for 11/01/2003

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