[IAEP] Texas Senate Bills 866 & 867 regarding dyslexia passed over the weekend

[James Simmons]

Actually, Read Etexts already has a built-in downloader for Gutenberg
Etexts.  Just open it from the Activity ring (instead of resuming an
existing text) and you'll see the Gutenberg-specific downloader.

It is much easier to implement text highlighting on a plain text file
than it is on a PDF, EPUB, DJVu, etc.  Speech is easy.  It's knowing
how to do the highlighting that's difficult.

Now that PG is distributing EPUBs maybe support for plain text files
is less important, other than TTS with highlighting.  I was scratching
my own itch when I originally wrote it.  I wanted to read free e-books
on my XO and the only thing Read supported was PDFs.  If I had known
about Feedbooks, which converts the plain text files from PG to PDFs I
probably would not have written it.  (In fact, if the Kindle had been
cheaper when it first came out I might not have participated in OLPC
at all).

PG text download is done using a built in book catalog that is created
from a text catalog of books that PG updates now and then.  OPDS
support for downloading plain text files would be a lot better, but
there was no such thing when I wrote it.

I'm pleased that Gonzalo is working on improving Read.  I'm working on
a book on using e-books with Sugar and it looks like I'll need to
check out his latest work before I can finish it.  If he can make Read
Etexts totally unnecessary it will live on as sample code in "Make
Your Own Sugar Activities!" at least.

Read Etexts also has multiple bookmarks, annotations, and text
highlighting, and if the paragraphs aren't too long it will remove the
line endings from PG texts so they can be re-wrapped to fit the screen
and font size.  It will even convert Baen Free Library RTFs to plain
text files, another dubious feature now that Baen has EPUBs.

James Simmons


On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 7:24 AM, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
> Well, you are describing our solution :)
>
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 3:15 AM, Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at laptop.org.au>
> wrote:
>>
>> On further thought, it seems to me that there should be two activities.
>>
>> The first is a reader. At minimum it should read plain text, PDF and
>> EPUB files. The Read activity fulfils this requirement. An additional
>> feature would be text-to-speech, with word highlighting (as Read
>> ETexts has). In this way, you can run TTS on any source file.
>>
>
> Read can open PDF, EPUB, DejaVu and text files. Can do text to speech
> with word highlighting of text files, and only text to speech of EPUB files
> right now.
> The idea is add the capability to the other formats.
>
>>
>> The second is a fetcher. It allows searching through different
>> pre-defined repositories, and the selected book can be downloaded to
>> the journal. The Get Books activity fulfils this requirement. Files
>> opened from the journal open up in the reader. An additional feature
>> would be to add additional source repositories (similar to how
>> Software Update works). This will allow deployments to create their
>> own catalogues of books and make them available online.
>>
>
> This is the description of GetBooks. A deployment can use Pathagar
> to create a book repository. In eduJam, we talked about how improve
> the tagging of books to create catalogs, and we need to do a few changes in
> the server code.
> Nicholas and Daniel worked in code to add dynamic catalogs to GetBooks,
> and we are trying to improve it. GetBooks and Pathagar use the OPDS
> protocol.
>
> Gonzalo
>
>
>>
>> I think it's important to split the reading from the fetching to avoid
>> having an overly complicated activity. The journal is the means by
>> which they connect.
>>
>> What do people think of this idea?
>>
>> Sridhar
>>
>>
>> On 29 May 2011 04:07, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
>> > Yes, I was working trying to merge the code in Get Books and Read
>> > activities.
>> > Now, you can read "plain text" files in Read, and Get Books can download
>> > books from
>> > Feedbooks and Internet Archive.
>> > A missing part is download books from Gutenberg project.
>> >
>> > Gonzalo
>> >
>> > On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan
>> > <sridhar at laptop.org.au>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On 28 May 2011 04:36, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> > Marilyn,
>> >> >
>> >> > I wrote an Activity called Read Etexts that might be of some use to
>> >> > you.  It can take one of the "plain text" files put out by Project
>> >> > Gutenberg and read it aloud, like a Kindle.  As it reads the words it
>> >> > highlights the word spoken.  The highlighting needs a faster computer
>> >> > than an XO to keep up with the word being spoken, but it doesn't need
>> >> > to be much faster.
>> >> >
>> >> > http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035
>> >> >
>> >> > James Simmons
>> >>
>> >> This activity looks like it could have some real potential in our
>> >> deployments.
>> >>
>> >> It seems like there's a lot of functionality crossover between Read
>> >> Etexts, Get Internet Archive Books (your code) and Get Books (based on
>> >> Get Internet Archive Books). Are there any thoughts about a merger? A
>> >> reader that could pull content and vocalise the words from all of the
>> >> sources supported by Get Books (plus external files) would be
>> >> fantastic!
>> >>
>> >> Thanks,
>> >> Sridhar
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> >> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> >> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>> >
>> >
>
>