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Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?


From: Tim Cross
Subject: Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2006 15:33:40 +1100 (EST)

From: Dieter Wilhelm <dieter@duenenhof-wilhelm.de>
Subject: Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?
Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2006 13:35:22 +0100

> >
> > The other thing is that once you get to know elisp, extending or
> > changing emacs' functionality is so easy, its just simpler to do it in
> > emacs than actually develop something else - especially as often the
> > most boring and time consuming part of creating a new app or bit of
> > functionality is the interface and with emacs, most of this is already
> > done. I even know people that use emacs as their window manager under
> > X - instead of an exec fvwm (or whatever) in their .xsession file,
> 
> I'd love doing this but my font size of the virtual consoles is too
> big.
>

Possibly I misunderstand your point, but under X, you can set the font
size either through xrdb or the emacs command line or through
customize. Under the virtual consoles on Linux, you can reduce the
font size as well - you don't have the same choices as under X, but
you can change it so that instead of an 80x25 display, you can have a
(I think it is) 180x32. At one stage Redhat Linux actually had this as
the default. From memory, you do this via an option in lilo (not sure
what the procedure is with other boot loaders like grub). 
 
> > they have an exec emacs. As a blind user, I use a package called
> > emacspeak, which provides sophisticated speech feedback that allows me
> 
> Are you completely blind?  So that the emails must be read for you by
> emacsspeak?  Then the usual way of "citing" (including snippets of
> older mails) in mailing lists must be very disturbing for your hearing
> experience.  How are you dealing with this and quotations and acronyms
> and capitalization and ...?
> 

I'm not completely blind - hey estimate I have around 1%, but that is
a guess really as my sight is poor enough to make determining how good
it is nearly impossible. I cannot read books or the computer screen,
but I can see distorted colour. To some extent, its a bit like looking
through frosted glass (like you find in bathrooms etc). 

One of the features of emacspeak which makes it stand out from
commercial screen readers is that it has a different philosophy.
Rather than just providing "dumb" speech feedback, emacspeak uses an
approach called voice-lock, which is like font-lock, but instead of
using different colours, it uses different voices or changes the
tone/pitch of a voice to provide more information. For example, cited
text will be spoken in a different voice, capital letters at the
beginning of a word causes the word to be spoken in a higher pitch,
words that are all capitals are spelt out (as they are often an
acronym) etc. You can set the system to ignore punctuation, speak some
punctuation or speak all punctuation - so, if I'm reading text, I
might set it to no punctuation or perhaps some punctuation. If I'm
programming, I will set it to speak all punctuation. 

In addition to using different voices, emacspeak also uses auditory
icons - a blank line causes a specific tone to be generated, opening a
new window causes another sound to be played, etc. I also take
advantage of features in programs like gnus which will allow me to
"fold" cited text, so that the buffer is narrowed just to the new text
etc. 

At the moment, I'm trying out new mail/news programs. This message is
the first one I have posted with the 'mew' mail/news reader for emacs.
I normally use VM, but lately, I'm getting problems with VMs ability
to handle some MIME types - in particular, attachments sent from MACs
using apple mail. However, I have to do a fair amount of work before
mew will give me adequate speech feedback. Essentially, this involves
adding advised functions with defadvice that adds speech feedback to
the app. 

Tim




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