FontSmootherWill the Palm people kindly tell me why I had to mess with the FontSmoother program to get decent Times Roman and some other basic font choices for e-books on my TX?

PDAs for remote regions of Africa and the rest are a worthy cause. But as PDAs exist now, they’re too much of a challenge even for the developed West. Maybe there’d be less talk of dedicated e-book readers if Palm and brethern did their jobs better. I don’t see why ordinary customers must play hacker (no, FontSmoother is not the easiest of installs, even for veteran computer users). Better that PDAs come with a variety of great fonts built in.

Yes, allow add-on programs for those who want them, but don’t dare leave civilians stranded, especially when sales of traditional PDAs without phone features aren’t so hot compared to the past. I know–software isn’t free. But with volume, the costs wouldn’t be that great.

Nasty detail: Another program, Fonts4OS5, made my TX crash. So I really ended up paying twice for a font program. Luckily FontSmoother is on sale for $9.95, a $3 discount, through the end of July. Another option, less difficult but with fewer font choices, would be the Agfa Monotype eBook Font Pack for Palm OS, selling for $14.95.

The good news: I’ll mitigate my criticism by nothing that FontSmoother can pick up fonts from Windows and has a cool feature to let you vary the lightness or darkness of the fonts.

Detail: Contrary to what the screenshot suggests, FontSmoother is up to version 1.76. And, no, the image isn’t showing Times Roman or the exact font I’m using now, Charter.

More detail: While fonts take up room to store, vendors if need be could stick the basics, such as good Times- and Helvetica-style fonts. Needless to say, memory and storage costs are declining.

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