Do you need to take documents with you on the road? Are your documents created in applications other than Pocket Word? If so, you have a few choices for applications that will allow you to take your documents with you. I had an interesting dilemma. I am a composer who uses a program called Finale to write music. I wanted to see if I could take my music with me on my iPAQ. My first thought was to create a .pdf file with Adobe Acrobat’s writer. I haven’t had much luck with .pdf files in the past because Adobe has to embed the font used to create the music in the .pdf file. Sometimes it works but only with certain versions of Adobe Acrobat.

I searched the pdaBlast! Software Database for .pdf readers and found several. I tried all of them but had no luck in reading my music file. Every time I save a pdf file on my iPAQ, I could not read it. I then ran across Repligo by Cerience. The description of Repligo sounded perfect for what I was looking for so I gave it a whirl.

I downloaded and installed Repligo and it placed itself right on my iPAQ. It also installed a portion of the program on my desktop PC that would allow me to save documents from nearly any program into my iPAQ by printing to the Repligo print driver. Many programs use this kind of print driver so it was a no-brainer as I was already familiar with this process. Repligo even placed a toolbar in some of my programs like Microsoft Word, so I could convert a document easily to Repligo’s file type.

I opened my music writing program and printed my document right to the Repligo driver. Once I printed my music file in Finale to the Repligo print driver, it asked me where to save the file. I saved it to my desktop and there was an icon for a Repligo file. How easy is that?

I opened the file on my Desktop PC and the Repligo reader launched for me. It looked great. Everything was there. I then flipped to the next page and found that the music looked jumbled. I wrote to Repligo and it looks like there might be a slight compatability problem with the music program I use. No surprise here as very few companies would support a music writing program. I’m still hopeful though.

What next? I tried printing several documents of various kinds to the Repligo print driver. Every document I printed came out flawless. I printed Microsoft Word documents, Publisher documents, Excel, and the list goes on. Everything came out perfect. The footprint of the Repligo viewer seems to be smaller than Adobe Acrobat. The program launches faster on my PC and seems a lot easier to work with.

Repligo has a feature called “flowed view” which allows you to see the contents of your file in one long continuous string. I’m not sure when this would be useful but it is a feature of the program. I suppose if you just needed to read the text of your document without regard to formatting it might help. If you converted a Microsoft Publisher document it might help.

Full View	Flowed View

Repligo has other features that make it interesting. You can view your documents in portrait or landscape mode (ideal for spreadsheets). Repligo is also cross platform because it works on your PC, and on Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices as well as Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones.

It really is amazing that you can take nearly any kind of file with you on your PDA with Repligo. My expectations were definitely exceeded by this program even though it could not handle my music files.

I would recommend that you try it out for yourself and see if it meets your needs. It has a place on my PDA but it may not be for everyone. If you have a Windows Mobile PDA you already have Pocket Word and Excel so you won’t need to convert your Word or Excel documents. For Palm OS platform users this might be an option for you. Give it a whirl.