Using
AvantGo with the Palm Clipboard
The Problem
If you’re like me, you use AvantGo every day to browse timely content on your Palm (usually offline). I often want to copy some small snippet of text from an AvantGo page into a Memo, ToDo, or whatever for later reference – usually just a URL, an email address, etc.
Unfortunately, the current version of the AvantGo Palm client isn’t able to do this directly. While the Edit menu includes the standard commands (Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All), they seem to be disabled. I suspect this is because AvantGo pages use some variant of HTML for formatting, hyperlinks, etc. and the PalmOS clipboard only “understands” plain unformatted text. If AvantGo did utilize the standard PalmOS clipboard functions, the results would include all the HTML and formatting codes and you’d end up with unusable gibberish anyway.
Fear not, Palm users! After a little bit of thought and research, I’ve come up with a workaround that will allow you to copy text from AvantGo into your Palm’s clipboard – with some limitations, of course. You can only copy one screen of AvantGo text at a time, and you can’t select which text on the screen you want to copy.
Perhaps it’s not the most elegant solution - but it works! Like most things on the Palm, once you get used to doing it, it quickly becomes second nature.
Read on….or click here to download a printable .PDF version of this document:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~johnnyzero/avantgoclip.pdf
The Workaround
My solution
utilizes a freeware hack called ClipStringHack, which captures text
as it’s written to the Palm screen. You’ll also need to configure ClipStringHack
to make it work correctly with AvantGo (see Step 4 below). If you’ve
gotten this far, you’re probably somewhat of a Palm power user; so I won’t
bother going into what hacks and HackMaster are all about.
Setup
Step 1: If you
don’t have HackMaster or some other software for managing Palm hacks,
download HackMaster and install it to your Palm. You can find HackMaster
here:
http://www.daggerware.com/hackmstr.htm
Step 2: Download
ClipStringHack and install it to your Palm. You can find it here:
http://lthaler.free.fr/clipstring.htm
Step 3: From
the HackMaster screen, enable ClipStringHack by checking its checkbox. Then
tap on the “+” sign to go to the ClipStringHack Config screen.
Step 4: Configure
ClipStringHack with the following settings:
Checking
“generate new line” causes ClipStringHack to correctly handle any line feeds
in the AvantGo text, and (usually) eliminates run-on text.
If you
set the rectangle coordinates as shown above (0,12 and 160,152), the “capture
area” will exactly correspond to the text viewing area in AvantGo. If you
leave them set to the defaults (0,0 and 160,160), you’ll end up capturing
lots of extraneous text that you don’t want (menu text, etc.).
Note: After
much trial-and-error, I got the coordinate settings so that they work correctly
on my Palm IIIxe. You may have to experiment with slightly different
settings to get it to work right on your rig, especially if you have a Sony
Clie’ (which has slightly different screen dimensions from Palms and Visors).
Step 5: Once
you’ve configured ClipStringHack as shown above, tap on OK and then return
to the Palm’s Application screen.
Now that
you’ve installed and configured ClipStringHack, you should be ready to go.
How To Do It
Step 1: Run AvantGo
and load the document whose text you want to copy.
Step 2: Scroll
up or down until the desired text is displayed in the viewing area.
Step 3:
Use AvantGo’s
‹ navigation button to back up to the previous
page.
Step 4:
Activate
ClipStringHack by drawing a horizontal line from the Calculator button to
the Graffiti area. You’ll see "ClipString ON" momentarily flash on your screen.
From now
on, everything that’s written to the screen (within the capture area) will
be copied to the Palm clipboard.
Step 5:
Use AvantGo’s
‹ navigation button to return to the page that you want to copy. You’ll
notice that the page loads a little more slowly because ClipStringHack is
capturing the text as AvantGo writes it to the screen.
Step 6:
Turn off
ClipStringHack by drawing a horizontal line from the Calculator button to
the Graffiti area. You’ll see "ClipString OFF" momentarily flash on your screen.
Step 7:
VOILA!
You can now go into another Palm application and paste the text into a new
or existing document.
Tips, etc.
- Once
you’ve copied the desired text to the clipboard, you can just press the
Memo button and paste it into a new Memo document. Once it’s in a new Memo,
you can then do any necessary editing or return to AvantGo to grab additional
pages before you paste it into some other app.
- If you
leave the both the new Memo and the AvantGo doc open, you can easily
toggle back and forth between AvantGo and Memo to grab additional pages
using the steps outlined above.
- When
you press the PageDown button in an AvantGo document, there’s a one-line
overlap. Use manual scroll as needed before capturing the next page.
- If the
text you want to capture is located on the first page of an AvantGo
doc, you can just use the Reload Page command instead of the ‹ and
› navigation buttons as follows:
ClipString ON, Reload Page, ClipString OFF
·
If you’re browsing an
AvantGo custom channel that you’ve created from a “regular” Web page and you
tap on a mailto: hyperlink, you’ll get the following message:
AvantGo does not support
the protocol for this URL:
mailto:someguy@scuzznet.com
You can use ClipStringHack
to copy the email address as follows:
ClipString
ON, tap on the mailto: hyperlink, ClipString
OFF, OK
Conclusions
99% of
the time I only need to capture a small snippet of text, such as a
URL or email address so that I can paste it into a Todo or Memo and deal with
it later. In these cases, ClipStringHack works great. Admittedly, grabbing
large multi-page documents like this could be hazardous to your sanity!
If you
absolutely need to get a larger online document into your Palm, it’s
usually easier to grab it using your computer’s Web browser - most AvantGo
content is also available on a regular Web page somewhere. If you’re a Windows
user, there’s a great freeware utility called IE2PDB Explorer Bar.
It’s an Internet Explorer toolbar object that converts Web page text to
a Palm DOC file. It even cues up the DOC file to be installed on your next
HotSync! You can find it here:
http://www.camelot.net/software/ie2pdb.htm
If you found this document helpful,
please feel free to drop me a line at: