A. Using Newton Books
1. How do I view a Newton Book?
The Newton Book Reader is a system-wide service built into the Newton OS. Refer to the user guide that came with your Newton device for details on using the Book Reader, including turning pages, viewing the table of contents, annotating, setting bookmarks, and so on.
2. How do I use MacinTalk with a Newton Book?
Mark “Bernie” Bernstone’s application called Bernie’s BookReader allows you to read a Newton Book aloud using the text-to-speech capabilities of MacinTalk.
Steve Weyer’s HTMList extension is an HTML authoring tool saves formatted notes, Newton Works documents, and Newton Books as HTML. It can also convert Newton Books to Newton Works and adds “text routing” to Newton Books and Help Books, allowing you to Beam, Mail, or Speak a specific range of Newton Book pages.
See also: How do I use MacinTalk to convert text to speech?
3. Where can I find Newton Books?
- Rob West’s Project Newtonberg created hundreds of Newton Books based on public domain text and books released for free distribution.
- The Arizona Macintosh Users Group (AMUG) once offered a huge collection of Newton Books, but the FTP server is currently missing in action.
- Josie Farmer compiled a handful of books (mostly relating to author and composer Paul Bowles) at Planet Newton UK.
- Newton’s Library was compiled by Anniqa Tjernlund and company between 1997 and 2002.
- A resurrected version of Newton’s Library is currently maintained by Eric Brown.
- UNNA Books
- The UNNA mirror of Planet Newton Books.
- Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
- Terry Fischer’s Yet Another Newton Book Site!
- Ed Kummel’s Newton Books page is optimized for installing book packages directly to your device.
4. How do I view PalmDoc files on a Newton?
Steve Weyer’s PilotDOC plugin for Newt’s Cape displays PalmDOC (also known as AportisDoc or PilotDoc) files, as well as ImageViewer graphics, by converting them into Newton Book format.
5. How do I view PDF files on a Newton?
There is no PDF viewer for the Newton platform. However, there are several online tools which will convert PDF to another format viewable in your favourite browser.
Adobe’s assortment of online PDF creation and conversion tools.
Convertio’s File Converter can convert PDF files to HTML, text, and dozens of other formats.
PDFConv by Hendrik Lipka and Eric Schneck can convert a PDF into a series of images and a HTML file which you can view using Newt’s Cape. It can also convert a PDF into a Newton Book.
6. Why don’t Newton Books rotate when I change screen orientation?
It seems that whomever worked on the book reader application built into the Newton OS was cutting corners. Rather than handling books formatted for the various screen orientations that Newton OS 2.0 provides, the user is presented with an unhelpful error message.
Fortunately, Victor Rehorst created a patch called RotateBook which automatically rotates the screen to fit the book format. This patch is for devices running Newton OS 2.1 only.
B. Creating Newton Books
1. What software do I use to create a Newton Book?
You can use Apple’s software to design books from RTF files or any other XTND format (Newton Press) or from files with a special format (Newton Book Maker).
See: Book creation and development software
2. How do I create a Newton Book on a Newton?
Steve Weyer’s Newt’s Cape will allow you to save a web page as a Newton Book package.