Wikipedia:TomeRaider database

Several Wikipedias are available in TomeRaider 3 format - a commercial ebook reader - for offline browsing on a handheld (Pocket PC, Palm OS or EPOC) or a Microsoft Windows PC.

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference.
Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

Each database contains all unabridged articles for one wikipedia. However all meta information (user pages, upload info, discussions, etc) and multimedia (video and sound) have been discarded to save memory (which comes at a premium on handhelds). Images are optional in some cases, but add greatly to the file size. For handhelds you will need a large memory card. The newest text-only TomeRaider file for the English Wikipedia measures roughly 3.3 GB.

As of summer of 2007 new TomeRaider3 files have been built for several wikipedias.

Target platforms

Most TomeRaider files are platform independent. However the Wikipedia databases for TomeRaider3 come in varieties that make best use of the capabilities of a platform:

(P)PC - For Windows PC and Pocket PC handhelds. This version of TomeRaider3 fully supports HTML and CSS. It renders the articles almost similarly to the online Wikipedia.
Palm - TomeRaider3 for Palm has limited HTML support. As a result the articles are shown with basic formatting. Complex tables are a bit unorganised. On the Palm platform TomeRaider3 can only read files up to 2 Gb (even when the handheld uses FAT32 file system). Therefore editions larger than 2Gb need to be published as several volumes. Hyperlinks between these volumes are turned into external references and have to be resolved manually.

Wikipedia TR3 Files

Spanish version (up to January 2009) -

TomeRaider 3

Since Oct 2004 a new version of TomeRaider is available with major improvements:

Image support
Category support
Even better text compression
Advanced search facilities

Searching with TomeRaider

After downloading the TomeRaider database, one can search the Wikipedia version offline. One can also search for parts of words.

To search the text that appears only in the page history, you must export the text to XML format first.

External links

Yadabyte publishes the commercial ebook reader TomeRaider.
Several ready-made Wikipedia database files can be downloaded.