Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

Series 5 owners are having a field day at the moment. As I write this (in October 1998) more and more of the 'killer' applications available for the Series 3a/c are becoming available (often in improved form) for the 32-bit machine.

With the savage 40k restriction on 16-bit Word files, Reader was always one of the most popular programs on the 3a and 3c, allowing truly huge text files to be compressed down and read 'on the fly'. Whole libraries of 'e-books' in its special TCR compression format sprang up, with texts of the classics of literature freely available for reading in odd moments. Many people (including me) also found uses for it in compressing their own reference texts with the supplied DOS TCReader utility (to be found inside the Reader distribution.

And so to VReader5, the latest incarnation of the genre, and available as freeware on the Series 5. Jean-Luc Damnet has excelled himself, producing a comprehensively useful application, which you can download here as vr201.zip.

As with Reader before it, VReader5 allows browsing through TCR compressed text files, with display offering a dozen zoom settings and text orientations and with the space bar skipping you forward a page at a time. There's even an autocue function where up to 8 different scroll speeds can be selected, though I would have liked a greater maximum speed.

VReader5 is very configurable, with preferences and settings galore. Although there's a Find option, it's so sloooow as to be unuseable. A function which works much better is the bookmark system, with up to 10 definable (and named) marks which can be jumped back or forward to at will. Very well implemented, and indispensable in the context of some of the long documents that VReader5 will be presented with.

An extensive set of help screens and various export options complete an essential addition to the Series 5 software library. Jean-Luc is encouraging translation of the text elements in the program into different languages, with English and French being available so far. One to watch!

There are hundreds of ebooks on ftp.nwt.com, but if you're in a hurry here are ten of the best (including Tarzan, The Time Machine, Jungle Book, The Invisible Man & Beowolf) as ebooks.zip (954k).

VReader5 can also read Palm/Pilot etexts. Here's the Windows MakeDocW tool required to make them: MakeDocW.zip

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