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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?
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).
*sigh* back to work...
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.
Try a *very* old reflective-screen laptop. Not a backlit LCD, just plain old reflective. Trouble is, they tend to be a little bulky.
You could try EText Reader, for linux or windows. Allows you to read zipped etexts as well as retrieve online Project Gutenberg texts. You can also select the font and bookmark stuff.
It has always struck me as odd that so many people seem to think it's a good idea to read books on their computer screen. With the eye-strain problems of current display technology, I simply can't see how anyone could even contemplate it.
Until there is a display technology available that doesn't have this problem, you're better off printing it. Rather use up a bit of paper and ink than damage your eyes.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
To skip the PG boilerplate, search for the text END*THE SMALL, capitalized and punctuated exactly so.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is a pretty well known & documented UI shortcoming with contemporary screens: between the fact that the typical monitor is backlit (thus, you're staring into a lightbulb the whole time -- and a flickering one at that) and the very low resolution compared to print (isn't typical resolution on the order of 72 dpi? that's worse than a cheap bubble-jet printer...), reading long texts off a CRT or LCD display isn't comfortable for most people. It's been written that this resolution issue is making computers a lot more uncomfortable for people than most folks realize, and that only with better screens (reflective instead of back-lit, and resolutions of say 1000dpi and higher) will reading electronic displays come to feel as comfortable as paper does for the average user.
I forget if I read about this in some of Jakob Nielsen's stuff, or Donald Norman, or maybe someone else, but in any case it's a matter that UI specialists are aware of. Last time I was reading about this -- a year or two ago now, maybe a little longer -- it was estimated that such technology is still a decade off, and I'm not sure how much progress has been made since then. Probably not much.
My favorite idea for dealing with this is the "electronic paper" being tested by groups like Xerox PARC and E-ink, where a sheet of this paper-like film has a matrix of particles that can, depending on the charge being applied to different parts of the matrix, arrange themselves to display arbitrary text or images. The idea is to figure out how to make a high quality version of this stuff that can be mass produced & sold for little more than traditional paper, so that a computer of the future might end up looking a lot like the books of the past, with the pages for the display and the computing components in the spine. That way you could have whole libraries in a portable format, textbooks (or Gutenberg texts :) could be downloaded & students would keep the same "book" from class to class, you could scribble notes on it for your own reference, or maybe even have it recognize what you're writing & use a stylus instead of a keyboard, etc. But aside from all the neat potential aspects of such a device, one of the explicit goals in trying to build it would be to end up with an electronic display format that is as comfortable & familiar as paper.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
You know, I've long found that using light text on a black background relieves much eyestrain - so much less radiation hitting your eyeball, plus a nice high contrast. If you run at really high resolution (and up your font size), the letters are really well-formed, too.
Using a sans serif font also helps readability on computer screens (the opposite of readability on paper - apparently this is accredited to the low dpi on computer screens).
Try changing settings to suit your own preferences, and don't _ever_ just blindly accept any program's default settings - especially for how things are displayed - everybody's pattern recognition psychology is unique in one way or another. Change fonts and font sizes, change screen resolution, vary the contrast (light on dark, dark on light), etc. Make sure you're using proper lighting in the room you have your computer in. These things all make a big difference, and each can vary a fair amount for each individual.
Have a day.
1. Open Gutenberg file in UltraEdit (shareware)
f f
2. Run this macro
InsertMode
ColumnModeOff
HexOff
UnixReO
Find "^p^p"
Replace All "QQQQ"
Find "^p"
Replace All " "
Find "QQQQ"
Replace All "^p "
3. Save file.
4. Run MakeDocW (free) on the file.
5. Hotsync to the Palm/Visor.
6. Read and bookmark in CSpotRun (free but you can send a donation). Annotate in something else.
The only thing that'll cost you is the PDA itself and I bet a used 2-meg one isn't that much.
GutenMark is a GPL'd program to format Project Gutenberg files into LaTeX. From here on, this can be converted into PS or PDF (sample), which can be easily read in a viewer with a large font size. This program also removes the PG banner, seperates text into chapters and italizes the appropriate words. And the page numbers give you free bookmarking.
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.