Optimum Reading App or Solution

By Tristan, 14 May, 2014

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi,

I'm looking for an app, or a solution, that will allow me to read books or articles that are in document form. For example, I have several books that are in TXT or pages formats. Loading them in Pages or Text edit causes voice over to say "new line" and "return" as well as indicate whenever a word is not spelled correctly when I read from the top. Is the best way to do this to just turn off attribute reading in VO, or is there something easier and more practical.

Thanks.

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Comments

By Gadget Meistress on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 - 01:29

I, for one, recommend Voice dream reader for reading your documents. You don't have to use voice over for the reading part, since the voicing for that is essentially self contained, although, you can look at parts of the text for editing and so forth with Voice over. It's great for text, pdf, and other document formats, as well as mp3s if you want to read audio mp3 books.

By Tristan on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 - 01:29

I have this on my iPhone. Is it available on OS X as well? My apologies, I should have been more specific in the initial post-- I thought posting under the OS X category would be sufficient.
Regards.

By KE7ZUM on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 - 01:29

What you could also do is load the document in to the say command and it will voice it on yoru mac as aiff which you can then convert to mp3 using amadeus or what ever.

Take care.

By Tree on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 - 01:29

its strange, I do not have the problem that your describing. I read very large files, including text books, in pages, text edit, and i text express all the time and voice over does not announce new line when i read with command a for read all. I know that what your describing happens because I have heard other people describe it. Sorry I'm not sure what option you should change but their must be one some where that will fix the problem. I love reading books in these text editors. Its super easy to copy things from them which is great for school. In fact my main way of reading text books is to buy them on amazon and convert the files, breaking the d r m. I can then read them in anything I want.

By Tristan on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 - 01:29

It's good to know that there must be a way to stop this somewhere. Text Edit and Pages are both really good for editing and copying as you go, the new line/return thing was the only thing really making me avoid it. I'll check out the voice over prefs to see if there's something I missed.

By Mlth on Friday, June 27, 2014 - 01:29

Hi

There is a cause and fix for the VoiceOver newline issue. This happens because the file is formatted with different newline characters, probably windows.
There's a handy little command line program which you can use to convert the text with proper newlines, and VoiceOver won't announce them in say-all mode in text edit afterwards.
It can be found here:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~craig/utility/flip/

You want to download the universal binary. The option you want is the -u flag, since it converts the textfile to unix newline.
Hope this helps

Malthe

By Tristan on Friday, June 27, 2014 - 01:29

Hi Malthe,
Thanks for the response! I found this out a few days ago, and now use something called 'WordServices'. It adds about 30-40 text functions as services, letting me select a whole document and simply press a command to convert the newlines to unix carriage returns. Maybe this is useful to someone else, so I'll post the link.
http://www.devontechnologies.com/download/products.html
Do a VO find for 'WordServices' and that should bring it up.

By Mlth on Friday, June 27, 2014 - 01:29

Hi Tristan,

Oo, those are a nifty bunch of functions. They can also remove duplicate line feeds, which I find super useful when reading. Thanks!

Malthe