PalmType Cyrillic & Turkish localization kit for Palm OS for Palm OS

About PalmType Cyrillic & Turkish localization kit for Palm OS

Palm Type is a Cyrillic localization kit for code page 1251 (Windows Cyrillic). This is the most popular Cyrillic code page in use in Slavic countries like Russia and Bulgaria. The system uses the original Grafitti, Cyrillic Grafitti help-screen and standard Russian or Standard/Phonetic Bulgarian soft keyboards for text entry.Palm Type also allows your Palm OS device to properly sort Cyrillic text. To the PalmType localization package is added Turkish localization kit for code page Latin 5 (Turkish Standard). The update comes free of charge to the registered PalmType users!Please read the User Guide for PalmType. Note: Due to the application specifics there is no trial download available for the product. Please make sure to read all product features and limitations before placing an order.Features

• Enhances Palm OS with code page 1251 (Windows Cyrillic)
• Enhances Palm OS with code page Latin 5 (Turkish)
• Provides Cyrillic system fonts (standard and high resolution Sony CLIE fonts)
• Provides four language-specific alternate keyboards: Bulgarian (BDS and Phonetic), Turkish and Russian
• Provides proper sorting for the selecting language in applications

Limitations

• There are different program versions for different OS versions; this version of PalmType only works on devices running Palm OS 3.x and 4.x. An alternative application for PDAs running Palm OS version 5.0 (and possibly higher) is available here;
• No more than two languages with different alphabets can be displayed/used at system level at the same time (see How does it work for details);
  For example one can have English and German (the second using umlauts) or English and Russian (Cyrillic is where umlauts are), but not English and German and Russian at the same time; in fact, since German and Russian overlay each other it is not even possible to have correct German and Russian at the same time without tweaking the whole code page upside down.
• Changing the active alternate language set requires starting the program; we are working to enabling hot switch from within any other program;
• Once activated, the program MUST remain in main memory;

How does it work?
Up to version 5.2 of Palm OS, the American and European Palm OS devices are using a single-byte code page, meaning they can only display and distinguish among 256 unique system characters. Alternatively, in the Japanese builds of the OS a character is represent by two bytes, allowing for much more unique characters.
Unicode is a standard for using the two bytes and representing all world languages; unfortunately, it is not applicable to the American and Pan-European versions of the Palm OS devices; hence, PalmType and this document are not anyhow related to Unicode.The lower 128 characters of all code pages, regardless of whether 1 or 2 bytes, are standardized and match the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). This is where the Latin alphabet, the digits, punctuation marks and a few other special characters are.The upper 128 characters available in a single-byte systems is where usually the alternate languages are.By default, all Palm devices contain the standardized extended Latin code page. The upper page contains the accented Latin characters used by various Western-European languages like German, French, Italian etc.Caution: adding any other language (e.g. Russian) to the device is only convenient if it is located at the upper 128 characters of the available system table and as such is only possible at the price of [temporary] losing the characters available there.The directly viewable result of installing any such localization enhancement on a single-byte system is that some Western-European characters across the device suddenly start looking oddly. It is important to know that it is only the appearance of the documents that is affected (as a result of changing the character glyphs for the upper half of the alphabet); the actual documents are not.In a nutshell, all localization programs replace several system resources, providing more or less of the functionality needed to read, enter and manipulate (for example sort) alphabets for particular language.Note: due to its specific implementation this product could not offer trial version; please make sure you read the full description before placing an order!Installation To install PalmType, first locate the folder with its files. There you will find two folders - one for Sony HiRes and one for Standard Palm Resolution. Choose the one appropriate for your device and in there you will find four files. You should install two of them: "PalmType.prc" - this is the application and one of the keyboards pt_bg_bds.prc (Bulgarian BDS), pt_bg_pho.prc (Bulgarian Phonetic) or pt_rus.prc (Russian).Both files need to be installed on the device, just as with any other Palm OS files. We strongly recommend that they get installed directly in RAM (as opposed to a media card), but in reality it is not a must; it is only important that once run, they do not get deleted from the main memory, unless the program is being un-installed according to the below instructions.Once the program files are copied, you should see PalmType's icon in the application launcher. Finally, you should perform a Soft Reset with your device to activate the program.Un-installationTo uninstall PalmType from your device, you should first open the standard delete screen (Menu > Delete) as you do when you go to delete any other Palm OS application. Then, find and select "PalmType" in the list of installed files. Tap on the "Delete" button and the "PalmType.prc" file is deleted, but you will get an error message that the application cannot be deleted. Tap "OK" and perform a soft reset with your device. Finally, open the delete screen again and select "Rus-1251" in the list of files and again tap on the "Delete" button. This way you will completely remove PalmType from your Palm.