Re: DAISY reader et al

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

While on this topic, I have found that you can sometimes get some
benefit from using one of the text to html converters which are
available and convert text files to html and then use w3/w3m to read
the file. 

I have also written a perl script which attempts to do a reasonable
job of turning text versions of the O'Reilly books into html with some
support for indexes and prev/next links plus breaking large text files
into smaller html pages etc. Its not perfect and I often need to
customize it a bit because the text format we get from O'Reilly tends
to vary considerably. However, if others think this might be useful,
I'd be prepared to put some time into generalizing it and making it
easier to configure and then making it available for others.

Tim

P.S. Also, just to confirm what Yvonne mentioned earlier, due to the
architecture of emacspeak and emacs and the use of buffers etc, it is
not possible to have emacspeak stop reading and have 'point' at the
position of the last work/character read. To do this, it would be
necessary to have some sort of bi-directional link between emacs and
the speech server so that emacs would know at what point the server
had processed its text input to (plus etc. This would involve a lot of
additional processing plus you have the complication that the servers
are not written in emacs lisp. 

Note that you do have the command emacspeak-speak-continuously, which
will speak a buffer continuously and is bound to C-e RETURN.

Personally, I've never used emacspeak-speak-continuously as I prefer
the command emacspeak-speak-browse-buffer which speaks the buffer
paragraph at a time - at least this way you know that when you stop
the speech that it was somewhere within a paragraph and that can make
it easier to find/repeat the last bit of text spoken etc.

Tim

>>>>> "Yvonne" == Yvonne Thomson <yvonne@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

    Yvonne> Oh yeah, I forgot to mention in my previous message. one
    Yvonne> of the things I've done when reading, for example, books
    Yvonne> in emacs, is do a search/replace for whatever the chapter
    Yvonne> heading is, e.g. if it's chapter 1, do a search for
    Yvonne> chapter with a space after it.

    Yvonne> You replace it with the same text with an asterisk or *
    Yvonne> character in front of it. Put the buffer in outline mode
    Yvonne> and then you can just hit ctrl-n to go to the next chapter
    Yvonne> or ctrl-p to go to the previous chapter.

    Yvonne> I use this sttrategy for a few things, including reading
    Yvonne> stuff from a program called sitescooper which grabs
    Yvonne> newspapers and stuff for me. Every story starts with a *
    Yvonne> sign, so I can just skip from one to another. So much so
    Yvonne> that I've actually set text mode to automatically have
    Yvonne> outline minor mode set as well.

    Yvonne> This probably isn't actually useful to anyone else, since
    Yvonne> I've been using emacs for so long now I've got my own
    Yvonne> weird ways of doing things, but I thought I'd mention it
    Yvonne> in case. You never know, after all, <grin>.

    Yvonne> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Yvonne> To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your
    Yvonne> address on the emacspeak list send mail to
    Yvonne> "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a subject of
    Yvonne> "unsubscribe" or "help"


-- 
Tim Cross					E-Mail: tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx
Analyst/Programmer                               Phone: 6773 3210
Applications Group			        Mobile: 0412 969193
University of New England
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