Read any document on your Pocket PC? No way - or perhaps there is, as Mike reports ...

"Oh great, another proprietory document reader!" That was my first impression on being asked to review Cerience's RepliGo 1.2 for Pocket PC but I soon found out that this product is more than another Acrobat Reader(tm).

" RepliGo allows you to intelligently convert your existing documents that reside on your desktop computer into a format that keeps the document's original appearance and can easily be read on your mobile device regardless of the document's native format. " says the web site. In simple terms, this means you can take almost any document you have on your desktop on transfer it to you Pocket PC for reading, irrespective of whether the PPC supports the native software format or not.

A full installation of the RepliGo software permits the user to convert documents into the RepliGo format for distribution. As with Adobe, there are also free readers available for a wide variety of platforms, including Windows, Pocket PC, MS Smartphone and others .

The process of creating documents is as simple as printing to the RepliGo print driver, but this is automated for Office documents and IE via a RepliGo button. Once converted, the document can be automatically sync'ed to the PPC if is is currently plugged in via ActiveSync. Because of this technique, basically anything that can be printed can be converted, I tried almost everything I had to try to fool it, Delphi source, Invoices from my accounting, Word documents which I'd converted through various versions, then to RTF, and printed via OpenOffice, even web pages. While there were obviously a few deviances here and there, given the treatment I gave the documents I think RepliGo did pretty well.

One very minor sour point was that two of the demo  Repligo format files I downloaded from the website (the Corel Sample and the Illustrator) wouldn't read on the PPC, saying they needed a later version of the reader. A very minor web site issue only and one which should not detract from the actual product assessment.

The reader which is installed on Windows is very similar to the Pocket PC reader and offers similar functionality, though some more viewing options are available due to the increased screen size.  Basically the reader permits a full page view of the document, full screen mode, various levels of zoom, a text flow view at five text sizes, rotation through 90 degrees, plus the usual scrolling and page navigation functions.

As with most other readers, it is not possible to select and copy text which I find annoying in all of them. There will be times when you want to assemble documents from others and, as often as not, you cannot do this from reader formats... but then again, it is a READER so, fair enough. [This functionality is available in v2.0 - Editor]

Most of the features are fairly obvious in function and worked well - the text flow is the one I found most useful. This viewing option takes all basic text and flows it within the viewing window reformatting on the fly so that the document's formating is effectively ignored and all text is visible without having to continually scroll around the screen looking at microscopic fonts. This was the point where RepliGo gained the biggest upper hand in my opinion, ironically with one of my test pdf documents which I converted to RepliGo format.