Emacspeak News --History Of User-Visible Changes
$Id: NEWS-8.0 4047 2006-08-11 19:11:17Z tv.raman.tv $
Author: T. V. Raman <raman@cs.cornell.edu>
Copyright (C) 1995 -- 2000, T. V. Raman
* Emacspeak 8.0 Additions And Changes:
Emacspeak 8.0 provides the following user level enhancements:
** Playing RealAudio: emacspeak-realaudio.el
Emacspeak now provides single click access to RealAudio
streams from anywhere on the Emacspeak audio desktop. For
details, see module emacspeak-realaudio.el Directory
realaudio in the Emacspeak source distribution contains some
Realaudio metafiles (.ram files) that you can use as a set
of sample shortcuts.
** Customizing Emacs: emacspeak-custom.el
Custom allows you to customize Emacs using a simple direct
manipulation based interface.
** Buffer specific navigation: emacspeak-imenu.el
Imenu produces a buffer-specific table of contents that
allows you to move through a buffer efficiently.
** Java Development Environment: emacspeak-jde.el
The JDE package provides an integrated development
environment for developping and debugging Java software
using Sun's JDK and associated tools.
** Browsing Software: emacspeak-speedbar.el
Speedbar provides a powerful tree-structured browser for
quickly navigating through large software modules. Speedbar
currently supports many programming languages and is fully
integrated with the JDE.
** Browsing Multiple Mail Spools: emacspeak-mspools.el
The mspools package allows you to monitor multiple
maildrops.
** Developing Python Software: emacspeak-python.el
Speech-enabled Python mode lets you develop Python code
effectively in an eyes-free environment. This is a good
example of Emacspeak's power --Python uses white-space for
block structure and would be a hard language to program in
using speech without Emacspeak.
** View mode Enhancements: emacspeak-view-mode.el
Editting keys in view mode now automatically get rebound to Emacspeak commands where it makes sense.
Thus, `l' executes command emacspeak-speak-line in view-mode.
** Emacs Frames:
Newer versions of Emacs (19.34 and 20.x) support multiple
frames on both terminals and graphical interfaces. When
using a windowing system like X, each frame is a separate X
window. On terminals, only one frame is displayed at a time,
but you can switch among frames.
Frames in combination with Emacs' windows provides a
convenient means of leaving a document open at two different
places. Emacspeak speech-enables all frame related
commands. In addition Emacspeak 8.0 provides a useful group
of commands for listening to the portion of the buffer
displayed in a frame other than the current frame.
*** Opening a book to two places at once:
Given a book in file book.txt, open the book as usual and
start reading. When you reach a stage where you would like
to leave the book open where it is and look at another
portion of the same book, bring up a new frame by invoking
command make-frame-command --this displays book.txt in a
newly created frame (in addition to the existing frame).
Now move to the portion of the book that you want to read.
The previous frame continues to display book.txt at the
position where you left it. Now while reading book.txt in
your current frame you can use Emacspeak's convenience
commands emacspeak-speak-this-buffer-previous-display and
emacspeak-speak-this-buffer-next-display to listen to the
portion that you were reading earlier.
For most situations two or at most three displays are more
than adequate-- but if you find yourself in a situation
where you need more, you can use command
emacspeak-speak-this-buffer-other-display.
*** More Sophisticated Uses
For more sophisticated uses and complex arrangements of
windows, use the above feature in conjunction with packages
like winring --see module emacspeak-winring.el
** Window Configuration Rings: emacspeak-winring.el
Emacspeak 8.0 speech-enables module winring.el for working
with multiple window configurations.
** Enhanced Audio Formatting in Enriched Mode:
emacspeak-enriched.el
Justification such as centered and right-justification are
now audio formatted when working with documents of type
Text/Enriched. For an example, open the enriched.doc file
in the etc directory of the Emacs distribution.
** Audio Indentation Changes:
Emacspeak 8.0 introduces a user customizable buffer-local
variable
emacspeak-audio-indentation-method that can be set to
"speak" or "tone".
Once this is set, emacspeak-toggle-audio-indentation uses
this when turning indentation on, rather than prompting you
each time
** Word Speaking changes:
Speaking a word the second time automatically spells it. In addition,
command emacspeak-speak-spell-current-word spells word under point.
** Dired Improvements: emacspeak-dired.el
Emacspeak now provides useful hotkeys in dired buffers for
speaking specific items of information such as file size.
** Tables On WWW Pages:
Starting with Emacs w3 4.0.18 Emacspeak 8.0 and W3 together
provide enhanced navigation through tables on WWW pages.
There is still a lot to be done-- but the current
enhancements make browsing sites that use tables for
multicolumn layouts a lot smoother. Thanks to Thierry Emery
<Thierry.Emery@aar.alcatel-alsthom.fr> who helped me write
the support code for W3, and as always a big big THANK YOU
to William Perry for his outstanding work on W3.
*** TO Do:
1) Nested tables.
2) Handle all table attributes and styles used on popular sites.
To try out this feature, open file tables.html from the
tables directory of the Emacspeak 8.0 distribution using
w3-open-local.
*** The additional commands provided in W3 mode by these enhancements are:
w3-table-move-to-top-of-table-column
w3-table-move-to-table-start
w3-table-move-to-table-end
w3-table-move-to-beginning-of-previous-table-row
w3-table-move-to-beginning-of-next-table-row
w3-table-speak-current-table-column
w3-table-move-to-previous-table-row
w3-table-move-to-next-table-row
w3-table-move-to-previous-table-column
w3-table-move-to-next-table-column
See the online documentation for details and keybindings.
** Browsing WWW Pages Based On Structure:
Using a W3 addon I contributed --w3-imenu.el-- Emacspeak and
W3 now let you browse the structure of WWW documents.
** Running Remote Emacspeak Sessions: emacspeak-remote.el
Enhanced Emacspeak's interface to remote speech servers by
adding the ability to guess the name of the host from which
you connect.
** Terminal Enhancements: emacspeak-eterm.el
The terminal extension now provides the ability to cut and
paste between terminals. See commands
emacspeak-eterm-copy-region-to-register and
emacspeak-eterm-paste-register for details.
There is a minor change to the algorithm used in
Emacspeak-eterm.el in speaking the character under the
cursor inside terminal buffers within character mode. This
now gives correct spoken feedback when filling in form
fields within full screen applications like LYNX --the only
drawback is that when using VI, moving forward a character
results in the previous character (rather than the current
character) being spoken.
** Speech-Enabled Menubar Support:
Emacs 19.29 and later provide pull-down menus. These are
useful to get the new user exposed to the various facilities
that are available. These pull-down menus are now fully
speech-enabled.
** Enhanced Navigation In Completion Buffers:
You can now navigate the *Completions* buffer by using the
alphanumeric keys to jump to the first completion that
starts with a particular letter.
** Comint and Completions:
Emacspeak automatically puts you in the *Completions* buffer
if hitting tab in a comint buffer e.g., when in shell-mode,
pops up multiple choices.
** Emacspeak Clipboard:
Emacspeak now provides a simple clipboard for exchanging
information between different Emacspeak sessions. This is
very useful if you run simultaneous Emacspeak sessions on
different hosts on the same network. See commands
emacspeak-clipboard-copy and emacspeak-clipboard-paste for
details.
** Cycling through marks in a buffer:
Emacs has always provided the means to cycle through the
marks in a given buffer. However, I have found these a bit
inconvenient in the past. Emacspeak introduces two new
commands --emacspeak-mark-forward-mark and
emacspeak-mark-backward-mark that allow you to move in
either direction through the mark ring.
** Emacspeak Resources:
The Emacspeak pronunciation dictionary --along with other
resources used by Emacspeak (such as the Emacspeak
clipboard)-- are now stored in directory $HOME/.emacspeak
** Emacspeak Finder:
All Emacspeak packages are now registered with the Emacs
Finder.
Use C-h p within Emacs to get an overview of all available packages.
** Viewing News And Package Summaries:
*** emacspeak-view-emacspeak-news displays the latest
Emacspeak News.
*** emacspeak-view-emacspeak-doc displays automatically
generated documentation on all Emacspeak commands.
*** Emacs' finder-by-keyword (C-h p)
includes summaries of all emacspeak packages.
** Spoken Messages:
Spoken messages, e.g., appointments now pause ongoing speech
rather than stopping it --suggested by Greg Priest Dorman
* Emacspeak Developments:
** Windows NT:
Emacspeak 8.0 works on Windows NT using an as yet
unreleased speech server. I will announce availability of
this server when I am ready to release it.
** Emacs 19 Support:
Note that new modules in Emacspeak will not be supported on
Emacs 19. Many of these may work, but if they dont, that's
just too bad-- you should upgrade to Emacs 20.
** MBROLA:
Bart Bunting and I have put together a preliminary Emacspeak
speech server for the MBROLA speech synthesis system. This
is not yet ready for production use mostly because MBROLA
still has problems --see file mbrola.txt in the Emacspeak
distribution. An experimental copy of this server is
included in this release; however it is an experimental
release and you should use it at this time only if you are
in a position to contribute improvements. Please do not send
any bug reports related to MBROLA support.
Bart Bunting is continuing to work on this, and you can find
his latest version at
ftp://ftp.progsoc.uts.edu.au/users/bart/mbrola_server/mbrola_server.tgz
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