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.

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.