Programs for Reading Text Files?

dotpl asks: "Recently I acquired a number of books in text format from Project Gutenberg and archived them for later reading. When I came to read, I realised how hard it is to read text files on the computer screen, so I thought about developing a 'reader' that you can read text files with, selecting the fonts and colors you like, and which has a bookmarking feature - a la Vim - so you know where you were reading before. Then I realised that a software of the sort must already exist. How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?" While a browser may go a long way to providing the necessary functionality, most browsers bookmarking facilities are sorely lacking for this type of work, since they don't mark the position in the page, just the page, itself. Has anything like this been written?

Comments

Convert to PostScript before viewing

[Dan Ost]

I usually use enscript to turn it into postscript
and then use gv to peruse it. By doing this, I
create pages so that I have a sense of where I
am in the document and gv lets me easily advance
forwards and backwards using space and backspace
(seems about as intuitive as you can get).

Festival

[arunkv]

Try Festival from the University of Edinburgh. It's been available for years and the team continues to make improvements to the system all the time. Source is available here. In the past, the Systems Development Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology has also experimented with using Festival for reading out documents in Indian languages, although I don't know the current status of the project.

Re:"Has anything like this been written?"

[Gordonjcp]

Try a *very* old reflective-screen laptop. Not a backlit LCD, just plain old reflective. Trouble is, they tend to be a little bulky.

Re:Festival and eye strain :-)

[dmanny]

Mistaken or not, speech synthesis certainly would reduce eystrain. That's what the query wanted. Your solution stands alone in that it is the only one that solves the problem in such an absolute way.

Downsampled Texts..

[Wiwi Jumbo]

I've always thought that plain text "books" should be more then "plain text". More like HTML or that damned XML everyone keeps talking about.

While the original would be formatted to display on screen with all the bells and whistles it could also be "downsampled" to lower quality for other devices like a PDA or something.

But I'm just babbleing...

Re:Just about any modern text editor will do...

[LeninZhiv]

Indeed. The trick is just getting things tweaked to suit your tastes.

For a number of packages and tips that should help you do what you want to do, check out the Display category of the Emacs wiki. There you'll find all the stuff you need to set up more scrolling options, nice fonts, display preferences, even moving the mouse out of the way.

I'll also second the comment made elsewhere here that using a light-on-dark colour theme feels easier on the eyes to me (I like blue-sea).

Re:Use Weasel Reader

[Calmiche]

I have to agree. I REALLY hate reading on my computer monitor. It gives me a cricked neck, horrible eye-strain and afterimages after just 45 minutes or so. Changing it to white text on black background helps a lot, but what you really need is a palm pilot!

I use an m505 and it's great. Any of the newer generations palms should be great. (Don't use the nasty old green screen ones.)

I can fit tons of books on it. (My 64 meg card holds about 160 books.) I use a program called Handstory, which allows me to change font sizes, bookmark lines, sort books into catagories, convert documents back and forth to my computer as well as acting as an online or offline webbrowser.

It's great, since it's nice and compact. I can carry it in my pocket. My girlfriend likes it since I can read in bed, using the backlight, without disturbing her. A fully charged battery will last 8 hours, and it only takes 20 minutes or so to recharge enough to read for a couple more hours.

It is a lot more comfortable, and my eyes don't hurt from using it like my computer screen does. The only problems I have is that, 1 the up and down buttons are placed at the bottom, rather than on the sides. (Some of the new Sony Clie's have jog dials on the side.) and 2, I have a hard time working with technical books, since drawings and schematics don't do well on such a small screen.

Calmiche,

Import into a Word processor!

[Stardate]

The first thought that came into my head was to just import the plain text into your favorite word processor (MS Word, AbiWord, OpenOffice, etc) and just select all and choose your favorite font! You can increase the point size and apply full justification as well.

I thought like Homer, "Everybody is stupid except for me." but i'm drunk so i'm a little violent now.

and i'm using windows... sigh. i have to install cygwin on my home pc... a simple bash prompt would calm me down so much... :-)

PostScript formatting

[turgid]

If you have something like gv (or ghostview) that'll read postscript documents, a2ps does a wonderful job of pagenating and formatting text of all kinds ready for printing to a Postscript printer or viewer. However, that doesn't solve your bookmarking problems. It should relieve some of the eye-strain, though.

Here's how _I_ do it: Rocket eBook

[dpbsmith]

"How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?"

Well, you asked... I have a number of scripts--they're written in Apple's MPW, but think "shell script" and "egrep" and you'll get the idea--that are specifically tuned to Project Gutenberg's format. Massages line breaks, provides true open and close quotes, and so forth.

They output the particular restricted subset of HTML that's acceptable as input to RocketLibrarian. Then I use RocketLibrarian to download them into my Rocket eBook, which really has very good characteristics. The size is right (midway BETWEEN PDA and laptop) and the screen is very readable.

Unfortunately... the Rocket eBook was acquired by a bunch of business geniuses at Gemstar who proceded to morph it into the REB1100, which is essentially identical to the Rocket EXCEPT that you can ONLY use it to read purchased (and expensive!) content. No "personal content" allowed any more.

It's a pathetic mess and if I get started I'll rant for hours...

But the bottom line is that I've NEVER been able to read comfortably from a fixed CRT sitting at a desk. And I've NEVER been able to read comfortably on cramped 160x160 pixel Palm.

But reading from the Rocket, which I purchased mainly for the specific purpose of reading PG texts, I read pleasurably and comfortably for hours.

It's a darned shame that the eBook industry has seemingly killed itself through greed and digital restrictions management.

Palm works great for me

[pmuellr]

Like other people suggested, I use a Palm. I've been using iSilo since it's been out; this is great for all kinds of stuff, including gutenbooks. I do a little work on 'em before hand to actually convert them to HTML (I don't understand why Gutenberg doesn't do this, but ... whatever).

I used to use a Palm Vx (160x160 4-bit grayscale), but have since moved on a 320x320 Sony Clie. When you get into a beat on the reading, turn on the autoscroll, and you don't even have to touch the PDA. The new Clie-with-a-keyboard's have 320x480 displays, and it sounds like from the description at iSilo that they support that mode. It's really a nice, inexpensive, well-supported program.

Be careful in looking at PDAs for displays that smear or bleed display contents when scrolling. For some reason, a lot of b&w Palms do this, and the color ones don't (at least the Sony Clie's don't seem to). I'd go nuts if I had to put up with a crappy display while reading. Bonus for reading off a PDA, if you can stand it, is that you don't need a light source. In fact, I have read my kids gutenbooks at night, and we turn off all the lights: my book becomes the light source.

I was also briefly thinking about getting a Rocketbook. I think this would probably be another good way to go if the screen is nice and big, doesn't have tracers when scrolling, and I can put anything I want on it.

"list"

[jmaslak]

DOS had a utility (not included with it, of course) called "LIST" which let you change colors and bookmark (IIRC). It didn't let you change fonts, but I have read lots of manuals with the program. It was basically "less" on steroids.

Link (Re:"list")

[NaDrew]

Buerg Software, home of LIST.

Good text readers..

[psycho_tinman]

Try ETextViewer, Tom's eTextReader or even Metapad (www.liquidninja.com ?)..

I personally prefer Tom's eTextReader myself, have read some fairly large texts on it (Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman empire, for example). you can set background colours, it actually renders the pages like a book (double columns).. YMMV, but I read a lot of texts off the screen and I havent found anything better.. This assumes that you're using Win32, of course.

For a Palm OS device, Weasel Reader rocks..

Re:Fundamental problem

[babbage]

The term is commonly used in printers rather than display technlogy, but the concept applies just fine to displays -- do some math before complaining! :)

All it means is "dots per inch", and it's perfectly valid to find that ratio for a typical resolution (640x480 on the low end up to, what, 1920x1240 on the high end?) and screen size (14" for a small CRT, 12" for a small laptop LCD, up to maybe 23" for the biggest common screens today?).

For the low end, that works out to roughly 45dpi and on the high end 83dpi (approximately -- I'm dividing screen pixel width by screen diagonal inches, which isn't quite right, but it gets you in the ballpark anyway). Last time I checked, even the cheapest bubblejet printers could do 300dpi printing, and did half that at "low" resolution.

Even the best video technology available does barely a quarter of the rate cheap printers typically do -- nevermind high quality ones. The difference may not seem obvious, but it is very real, and all computer users are probably subconsciously aware of it, if not consciously -- this plays a big role in the perceived strain in reading large amounts of material off a monitor.