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Programs for Reading Text Files? 131

Posted by Cliff from the reading-not-editing dept.
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?
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Programs for Reading Text Files? More

Programs for Reading Text Files?

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  • "Has anything like this been written?" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21, 2003 @08:11PM (#5357540)
    Yes. It's called lp. Or lpr. Take your pick.

    If you truly want to save your eyes, this is by far the best solution. I don't care what kind of monitor it is, or how good the fonts look. Staring at a monitor produces considerable eye strain. Staring at properly illuminated paper does not, to nearly the same degree.

    But I sympathize with the desire to save paper and ink. Hopefluly someone else has a good solution along those lines...

    • Re:"Has anything like this been written?" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Friday February 21, 2003 @08:29PM (#5357659) Homepage
      Try a *very* old reflective-screen laptop. Not a backlit LCD, just plain old reflective. Trouble is, they tend to be a little bulky.
    • This is true. No software is ever going to make looking at a computer screen easy on the eyes. Not only that, but the loss of mobility with a computer takes a big comfort hit. How often do you sit in the same position while reading a book? You are not given so much freedom while staring at a computer screen, be it a monitor or a laptop screen.

      So until computers are book-sized and book-weighted, with brighter, non-reflective screens, they will never replace books for the wonderful pastime of reading.
      • The mobility - yes. I read almost exclusively from gutenberg, using the best document reader I've ever seen, which also happens to be free, cspotrun [32768.com] (Get it, see spot run? A simple reader.) It does everything you are talking about, and there's no flicker in PalmOS. Edit the texts and prep them with any of the utilities - I generally just use makedocw [pierce.de]. The format (tealdoc, aportisdoc, whatever it is) compresses the docs about 2:1.
        All of your docs are always at hand, and open to wherever you last viewed them, and with the autooff function of palmos, you can shut off the light and read a book that, if you fall asleep reading it, saves your place and turns off the light.
    • Staring at a monitor produces considerable eye strain.

      If your eyes are being hurt by looking at your monitor, you have your contrast set too high.
  • One thing that would improve readability of Gutenberg titles would be for them to loose the huge mass of boilerplate text at the front. Often when I open a Gutenberg textfile I have a hard time finding the title to see exactly what it is I am about to read. There's always a huge mass of the same repetetive stuff up front.
  • konsole + vim

  • Convert to PostScript before viewing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dan Ost ( 415913 ) on Friday February 21, 2003 @08:22PM (#5357617)
    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).
  • Sounds like a job for the overhyped, yet underused markup langauge that is XML.

    • Re:XML (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Maybe, but getting structure from unstructured text would be a bitch. carriage-return = end of paragraph, except when it's a blockquote, and single lines are assumed to be headings, except when they're in speech marks because that single line might be in the middle of a conversation... it's hell giving structure to plaintext, but once there XML would be suited (XML to XSL-FO to Printed Page).
    • I understand that you are ironic, but how is structuring the text going to make it much easier to read? Clearly the poster wants something that enhances the readability of text mass. Most texts, like novels, do not have very much of a structure in them.

  • Festival (Score:4, Interesting)

    by arunkv ( 116142 ) <slashdot.element77@com> on Friday February 21, 2003 @08:24PM (#5357631) Homepage
    Try Festival [ed.ac.uk]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 [ed.ac.uk]. In the past, the Systems Development Laboratory [iitm.ac.in] at the Indian Institute of Technology [iitm.ac.in] has also experimented with using Festival for reading out documents in Indian languages, although I don't know the current status of the project.
    • Sorry, I misread your comment. Looks like you are not interested in the spoken word but just easier visual reading.

      • Re:Festival and eye strain :-) (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dmanny ( 573844 ) on Friday February 21, 2003 @09:38PM (#5358005)
        Mistaken or not, speech synthesis certainly would reduce eystrain. That's what the query wanted. Your solution stands alone in that it is the only one that solves the problem in such an absolute way.
        • I'm interested in making my texts into audiobooks. I can read on the screen easily enough, but there are times I'd be happy to hear them read, even by a machine.

          Etexts to listen to on my Zaurus would be fun, and I don't just mean MP3s.

          As someone who reads aloud, I know it'll suck because not only will there be no inflection, but the pronunciation will be marginal. Still, it could be interesting. I'm also interested in the possibility of combining this with some sort of inflectional markup language.

  • EText Reader (Score:5, Informative)

    by alphaseven ( 540122 ) on Friday February 21, 2003 @08:32PM (#5357672)
    You could try EText Reader [techass.com], 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.

  • eye strain (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Friday February 21, 2003 @08:39PM (#5357723) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • LCD (Score:2, Informative)

      by yerricde ( 125198 )

      Until there is a display technology available that doesn't have this [eyestrain] problem

      The future is now. Here's how LCDs work [howstuffworks.com].

    • my tips (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Friday February 21, 2003 @09:51PM (#5358056)
      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.
      • While increasing the resolution can improve clarity, it often comes at the price of refresh rate. Watch out!
        • Look, I have a sub-$100 (US) videocard (GeForce 2mx) that I got a few _years_ ago that lets me run at 1600x1200 32-bit colour at 85Hz, which oughta be plenty for anyone. That kind of thing shouldn't be a problem anymore.

          But refresh rate IS a good point to watch out for. People need to learn to configure their freaking computers.

          • Re:my tips (Score:2, Informative)

            by questionlp ( 58365 )
            Video cards can pump out high resolutions at fairly good refresh rates, but there are two limiting factors: the monitor and the quality of the video.

            Sure, a video card can pump out 1600x1200 at 85Hz, but it doesn't help if a monitor can only do 1280x1024 at 75Hz. Also, the quality of the RAMDAC and the components between it and the monitor are also very critical. Some people have complained about the GeForce's 2D quality, some haven't...

            That's why I love my Matrox G450 and dual monitors at work (1600x1200 @ 85Hz each) :)
      • In fact, that is not correct, as you receive much more radiation while reading a well-lit sheet of paper, and your eyes might even like it.
        Eyes have towo major enemies in displays, low resolution and low refresh rates. If you need to pick only one, pick high refresh rates, like 75+ for a 17", and more for a bigger one, or get a non-flicker monitor like an LCD.

        Also, black on white is much clearer, it helps focusing, the only problem with black on white is that flicker could become more visible, and increase eye strain, but it is avoidable.

    • Re:eye strain (Score:5, Informative)

      by spuke4000 ( 587845 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @12:32PM (#5360549)
      Rather use up a bit of paper and ink than damage your eyes.

      I had the same concern (I sit in front of a computer 8 hours a day at work) so I asked an optometrist this week. Her answer: looking at a computer screen causes 'short term' eye strain, but no long term damage. Basically, get a good night's sleep and your fine.

    • A lot of readability problems have to do with poor lighting. Really, the brightest white on your screen should match both the color and luminosity of a piece of white paper held up next to it.

      Adjusting your monitor's brightness, contrast and color temperature settings can make a huge difference in eye strain.

      The second recommendation I would make would be to put your monitor at the highest resolution and refresh rate it'll support (don't sacrifice resolution for refresh rate, though) and adjust your system's DPI settings to compensate. This ensures a 12pt font is displayed as 12pt and not scaled to something annoyingly small.
  • Emacs.

    If you're on OS/2, 'e' works, but tedit is less overhead.

    If you're on Windoze, Notepad.

    But by far, you can always print the file. Unless you have the sun right overhead it's gonna save big time on eyestrain.

    • And of course if you're running straight DOS (MS or PC), there's always good ol' browse.com (the file, not a URL) from about 10 years ago. Very handy to have on boot, utility, and emergency floppies.

  • Reading big files? (Score:4, Funny)

    by (H)elix1 ( 231155 ) <slashdot.helix@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Friday February 21, 2003 @09:04PM (#5357843) Homepage Journal
    How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?"

    Wait for the movie, silly...

  • Fundamental problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Friday February 21, 2003 @09:09PM (#5357866) Homepage Journal
    I'm not sure if I'm on the wrong track here, but I definitely feel out of step with the other comments I've seen so far. It seems to me like your main problem isn't so much the software you're using as it is the display technology itself, yes?

    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.

    • In the meantime, use a Mac or Windows (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GCP ( 122438 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @05:50AM (#5359571)
      I realize that's sort of a flamebaity thing to say in this audience, but there's just no comparison between the quality of text on a Mac or Windows and on Linux.

      I use Linux for work and for fun, but I always set it up so that most of my interaction with it is via a terminal program running on Windows. Many of my coworkers use Macs to access their Linux (and other Unix) machines, and I'll have to admit that the text on their Macs looks a little better than on my Windows machines.

      None of us can put up with the ugliness of text in current Linux GUIs, which looks like the Mac of almost 20 years ago.

      I expect Linux to catch up in the next five years or so (I sure hope so, because I'm using it more and more), but it's pretty hard to look at currently. I don't want to have to keep relying on some other OS to provide a tolerable window into my own Linux box.

      • None of us can put up with the ugliness of text in current Linux GUIs, which looks like the Mac of almost 20 years ago.

        Odd...I find that text on my Linux box is much more readable than on a Windows machine or Mac. (Ugliest text I've ever seen was defintely on a Power PCMac I had on my dekat at one job.)

        Of course, part of it is using the right font for the job. I use Lucidia Typewriter, a lovely fixed-width sans-serif font, in my emacs and terminal windows, and it's a joy. In my browser (galeon), I get to use fonts that aren't fscked up by "anti-aliasing" (worst idea ever - making characters blurry does not increase readability!)

        If you're trying to use some WYSIWYG word processor or something, there may be more of a problem - but that's a fundamental issue that fonts that work on paper don't work on screen, and vice-versa.

      • ?

        "None of us can put up with the ugliness of text in current Linux GUIs, which looks like the Mac of almost 20 years ago."

        I think "last years Linux GUIs" would be more appropriate. Have you looked at the gnome 2 screenshots [duke.edu], for example?
      • My Linux installation looks much better than my Windows installations.

        Have you looked at freetype and the TTF fonts available? This stuff looks great and is easy to read for me.

    • Re:Fundamental problem (Score:3, Informative)

      by sporty ( 27564 )
      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.


      Try setting the background to black and the text to a low intensity shade of white (or colour). Increase the fonts to a size above average for text book reading, and doublespace. For me, it gives the least eye problems. I do almost the same for coding. Otherwise my eyes start to hurt aftere a while.
      • Try setting the background to black and the text to a low intensity shade of white...

        I wonder why /. doesn't do the same for the site itself- it would help in reading the site, no?
        • There's been this strange thing about black sites (or dark ones of any shade) being... depressing. I think people relate the web to paper and not TV. A white pamphlet wouldn't be depressing, while a black tv add isn't. Who knows.
      • Studies actually show the opposite is true: reading dark text on a light (reflective) background is easier on the eyes.

        You're right in that the biggest contributor to eye strain here is the bright flickering light in your eyes.

        The solution to this is to operate your monitor at the highest refresh rate it will support and to adjust the brightness, contrast and color temperature settings to match your environment. If I open up a window that's all white, and hold up a white sheet of paper next to the monitor, the brightness and color should match. For me, this means raising the refresh rate of my monitor to 85+Hz, dropping the color temperature rather significantly and reducing the contrast.

        Secondary to that, consider raising the resolution of your monitor as high as it'll go without sacrificing the refresh rate. To compensate for the apparent shrinkage in size of all of your display elements and text, instead of just making those things bigger, raise your system's DPI settings. In theory, everything should look exactly the same size that it did before you raised your screen resolution, except it'll be sharper and clearer. A 12pt font should appear the same size regardless of medium and resolution.

    • Re:Fundamental problem (Score:2, Insightful)

      by krilli ( 303497 )
      "thus, you're staring into a lightbulb the whole time -- and a flickering one at that"

      i just want to know why everyone says that having light from a lightbulb flickering at 60hz reflected into your eyes via a sheet of paper is inherently better than having a monitor flickering at your eyes directly ...

      (if lightbulbs flicker at all, that is ... do they? or is the filament glowing steadily?)

      anyway, what I do when i'm reading text off the computer screen is

      a) I reduce the length of the lines

      our vision system has a hard time tracking lines longer than X words. this is what makes you "miss" sometimes when you're moving your eyes to a new line.

      b) increase the contrast to maximum, decrease the brightness all the way down (or as far as it will go down) and use a gamma control to even things out a bit (for Linux, the "gamma" and "xgamma" commands - in Windows / MacOS, the Adobe Gamma control panel. if you have access to a hardware color calibrator gadget, use that).

      if you do this, i promise you that you will have so much fun reading from your monitor, you'll even be digging up your old .txt ascii-porn files from that bbs way back when ...
      • why everyone says that having light from a lightbulb flickering at 60hz reflected into your eyes via a sheet of paper is inherently better

        It takes a certain amount of time for light to "fall off" when an electrical current stops or is reversed. For typical incandescent filaments, that "fall off" time is very long, so you would find it very difficult to measure any flickering.

        For fluorescent lamps (especially older ones), the difference is more severe, as the light falls away rather quickly. Fluorescent lights used to be a huge health issue in offices. Nowadays, the phosphores tend to emit light for longer periods, so the flickering isn't as bad.

        Monitors are the worst, though, since they need to be able to react to high-speed motion, so the image persistence needs to be very short.

        Fortunately, you'll be hard pressed to find a monitor nowadays that's limited to 60Hz. 85Hz is typically a standard minimum and that tends to reduce the apparent flickering significantly (though there will always be some that say they can still see it). Get up to 100Hz or better and you're fine.

        b) increase the contrast to maximum, decrease the brightness all the way down (or as far as it will go down)

        This is the wrong way to go about it. Generally, good color calibration tools require that you first set your monitor's brightness and contrast settings to a "sane" value first, where that "sane" value means the brightest white on your screen matches the brightest white around your screen (e.g. a sheet of paper). The goal there is to match your monitor's lighting with your ambient lighting. Once that's done, additional gamma or color profile settings can be used to scale your grays and match colors properly. But still, fixing your lighting is probably the biggest thing to help your eyes.
  • I have a big collection of manuals, literatures, and lyrics in text format. Most of the time, I find any of my perferd text editor would allow me view without much problem. gvim, xemacs, UltraEdit32, even notepad would let you change font, set wrapping, get the line number (for bookmarking).. just take your pick.

    Sometimes when I find plain text not enough for the perticular item I am reading, I just run it through some scripts to turn it into HTML or postcript so I can read it in my favorite browser/viewer.

    For myself, atleast, I find this is already more then enough for my day-to-day reading.

    • Indeed. The trick is just getting things tweaked to suit your tastes.

      For a number of packages and tips that should help you do what you want to do, check out the Display [emacswiki.org] category of the Emacs wiki [emacswiki.org]. There you'll find all the stuff you need to set up more scrolling options, nice fonts, display preferences, even moving the mouse out of the way.

      I'll also second the comment made elsewhere here that using a light-on-dark colour theme feels easier on the eyes to me (I like blue-sea).
  • Not a popular recommendation on /. I know, but the microsoft reader does what you want. It remembers the last page in an ebook you read, and lets you continue reading from that point next time you read that doc.

    • Re:hate to day it but M$ has a good solution (Score:4, Informative)

      by ianezz ( 31449 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @08:56AM (#5359885) Homepage
      With GNU Emacs you can set named bookmarks referring to a specific position in specific files (i.e. with M-x bookmark-set).

      Then, in a different session, jumping to a bookmark (M-x bookmark-jump) automatically opens that file again and positions the text where you set the bookmark (even if the text changed in the meantime: Emacs bookmarks keep some context lines with them).

      OTOH, the thing I really miss is a nice program from the Amiga days called "muchmore", which provided a sort of full-screen equivalent of the well known "less", but with smooth scrolling, autoscrolling, and both scrolling speed and direction could be changed by simply moving the mouse pointer towards or away from the screen borders. IIRC, it too had bookmarks on texts.

    • How? I downloaded it to try it on text files and doesn't seem to accept them. What are you supposed to do?

  • Use Weasel Reader (Score:3, Informative)

    by KDan ( 90353 ) on Friday February 21, 2003 @09:18PM (#5357917) Homepage
    If you have a palm, it's much much easier to just use Weasel Reader [sourceforge.net] (formerly gutenpalm). It's actually designed for reading books, keeping bookmarks, etc - and even extracts the chapter headers for you when you create the pdb file from the txt file.

    Also the palm screen is less straining than these bright old monitors, a lot less.

    Daniel

    • Re:Use Weasel Reader (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Calmiche ( 531074 )
      I have to agree. I REALLY hate reading on my computer monitor. It gives me a cricked neck, horrible eye-strain and afterimages after just 45 minutes or so. Changing it to white text on black background helps a lot, but what you really need is a palm pilot!

      I use an m505 and it's great. Any of the newer generations palms should be great. (Don't use the nasty old green screen ones.)

      I can fit tons of books on it. (My 64 meg card holds about 160 books.) I use a program called Handstory [handstory.com], which allows me to change font sizes, bookmark lines, sort books into catagories, convert documents back and forth to my computer as well as acting as an online or offline webbrowser.

      It's great, since it's nice and compact. I can carry it in my pocket. My girlfriend likes it since I can read in bed, using the backlight, without disturbing her. A fully charged battery will last 8 hours, and it only takes 20 minutes or so to recharge enough to read for a couple more hours.

      It is a lot more comfortable, and my eyes don't hurt from using it like my computer screen does. The only problems I have is that, 1 the up and down buttons are placed at the bottom, rather than on the sides. (Some of the new Sony Clie's have jog dials on the side.) and 2, I have a hard time working with technical books, since drawings and schematics don't do well on such a small screen.

      Calmiche,

      • You can get Weasel Reader to display the stuff horizontally, so that the button will effectively be on the side. You can also set it to "auto-scroll" so that you don't even need to press the button (but it gets a bit annoying as I don't usually read at constant speed). I used it on an old palm and I never was bothered by the green screen.

        Daniel
      • ..."I can fit tons of books on it...." Even an 8-meg Palm III can hold 10 or 12 full-size books depending on what else you've got on there and a 2-meg would be adequate, holding say 3 volumes, if you just used it for that.

        And, ..."I can read in bed..." A PDA is so light and convenient it'll spoil you for anything else. Read in bed, in line at the grocery, anywhere. The reading in bed feature is best, though--no more cramping your hand around a paperback to hold it open or wearing out your arm with a heavy hardback.

        As for the old monochrome screen, it took a day or so to get used to, but by now I've read through a significant fraction of Project Gutenberg on that same green screen. So it's doable. William Morris would roll in his grave to see his typographical classics in CSpotRun, but at least they're available for a new generation of readers.
        • Indeed, I must now do over 60% of my reading with my Palm. For me I think the portability is the key, you can fit a whole library on a cheap MMC card, and mine is always in my pocket, so I can read in the queue at the supermarket, or while in the "littlest room". Why am I using a euphemism on Slashdot?

          Also with software like Plucker or Avantgo you can sync things like Slashdot or a newspaper web site to them as well,so they can replace magazines as well as books.

          One suggestion for those of a PC bent; there are Palm simulators (used primarily for software development) that will run on your PC and will handle any of the many Palm document readers.

  • Find a high quality LCD Screen (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've used a whole lot of CRT monitors over the years ranging from really cheap to really expensive. I've just bought a PowerMacG4 and the 17" Studio Display from Apple. Compared to a highend Sun 20" monitor (Sony Tube) Without a shadow of a doubt this display is the best I have ever used. It's closer to a 19" CRT in feel though. Flat panels are still too damn expensive. (Bought a Mitsubishi Projection Screen HDTV rather than a Plasma Panel)

    I want a second 17" Studio Display but I'll have to wait a few months before I can swing the $699 which is $200 off what I paid for the first 17"!

    Tip: Turn down the brightness on your monitor/display, especially if the room is darker. Avoid flourescent lighting as well. You get a lot of flicker from flourescent lighting. The LCD doesn't seem to have the problem with flourescent lighting.

    If you are on Mac OS X make sure you've set the Anti-Alias mode for the display you have. ie. Flat Panel or CRT.

    Note: Samsung makes most of the Apple displays so look for their products for a PC clone. Really good displays.

    Increase font size and experiment with black on white or white on black or white on blue, etc. I use gViM like this; change the color scheme now and then to give my eyes a break.

    Printing a large book like one of the Mark Twain books would use a hell of a lot of paper. Reading 8x11 or 8x14 paper is not the same as a book either. Running something off like that at Kinko's would be expensive. You might as well go to the local library and borrow the book for real. Or buy your own copy.

  • QREAD (Score:4, Insightful)

    by almightyjustin ( 518967 ) <(dopefishjustin) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday February 21, 2003 @09:45PM (#5358033) Homepage
    Project Gutenberg has a utility for exactly this purpose called QREAD. It's available here [ibiblio.org].

  • Downsampled Texts.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Wiwi Jumbo ( 105640 )
    I've always thought that plain text "books" should be more then "plain text". More like HTML or that damned XML everyone keeps talking about.

    While the original would be formatted to display on screen with all the bells and whistles it could also be "downsampled" to lower quality for other devices like a PDA or something.

    But I'm just babbleing...
    • Ascii can be read by pretty much everything. I think PG have a page on why they use the formats they use.

      HTML, if used properly, would be great, but people can't resist those pretty bells and non-standard whistles.

      XML(XHTML for this?) would then require an additional something to parse it out and display it. That abstraction may be better design, but its a pain if all you want to do is distribute free, unfettered text.

      SGML - well, most people find this one a bit... complex.

      Word.doc? Shudder.

      PG have only recently moved to HTML. They are concerned more with the propogation and longevity of these texts, less the nifty features.

  • PDA (Score:5, Informative)

    by texchanchan ( 471739 ) <ccrowley@@@gmail...com> on Friday February 21, 2003 @10:48PM (#5358319)
    1. Open Gutenberg file in UltraEdit [ultraedit.com] (shareware)

    2. Run this macro
    InsertMode
    ColumnModeOff
    HexOff
    UnixReOf f
    Find "^p^p"
    Replace All "QQQQ"
    Find "^p"
    Replace All " "
    Find "QQQQ"
    Replace All "^p "

    3. Save file.

    4. Run MakeDocW [pierce.de] (free) on the file.

    5. Hotsync to the Palm/Visor.

    6. Read and bookmark in CSpotRun [32768.com] (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.

  • Look at MS Reader (Score:3, Informative)

    by mcgroarty ( 633843 ) <brian@mcgroarty.gmail@com> on Friday February 21, 2003 @11:05PM (#5358387) Homepage
    MS Reader does a lot of things well. The bookmarking is one such thing. The bookmarks are tied to a word, not a line or a page. You can adjust font sizes or other options which will affect the layout, and your bookmarks are still good.

    The layout is attractive and natural, with ample margins, and no scrollbars or other such interruptions. The menus are all brought up by clicking on unobtrusive text at the top of the screen.

    MS Reader also allows plugins which can be activated on selecting a word, changing pages, etc. The three I've seen are a dictionary, a translation utility and a verbal reader.

    MS Reader uses .LIT files, which are pretty much just bundled and compressed HTML. It would be nice to see a similar open source book format.

  • HTML + browser (Score:2, Informative)

    by aldjiblah ( 312163 )
    is all you really need.

    With style sheets you're able to define exactly how the document should look, and display it across different platforms and browsers.

    I use this concept, along with small scripts I've written myself (you know Perl, right? :) to read Sci-Fi / Fantasty titles I've downloaded from Direct Connect on my Zaurus PDA.

    Highly recommended, since you can easily adjust the screen brightness on your preferred display device and turn off the regular reading lamp that's otherwise certain to annoy your spouse.

  • Text to PDF (Score:2, Informative)

    by Alpha27 ( 211269 )
    There are a number of options out there for this, and it make take care of the text rendering on the screen, and you can print from them as well. You can even read pdfs on some handhelds as well (I can on my zaurus).

    I would recommend this route if you know some programming and you should be able to piece something together.

  • uh? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    and which has a bookmarking feature - a la Vim

    So, uh, why don't you use vim then? Vim has a shitload of features for jumping around between files and remembering your spots. Just today I discovered that ctrl-O and ctrl-I moves you between files you've opened recently, furinstance. And it remembers your spot in each one. Use Gvim and change the font to HUGE and you can read with minimal eyestrain.

  • The first thought that came into my head was to just import the plain text into your favorite word processor (MS Word, AbiWord, OpenOffice, etc) and just select all and choose your favorite font! You can increase the point size and apply full justification as well.

    I thought like Homer, "Everybody is stupid except for me." but i'm drunk so i'm a little violent now.

    and i'm using windows... sigh. i have to install cygwin on my home pc... a simple bash prompt would calm me down so much... :-)

  • palmreader (Score:2, Insightful)

    by retsamxaw ( 64491 )
    I use a program called palm reader for my Palm. It keeps bookmarks, and it's portable. Many are talking about the issues with PC monitors, but I think a huge ergonomic issue is that you can't "curl up with it" like you can with a book or a magazine.

  • Emacs? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @02:31AM (#5359114)
    Personally, I use Emacs. I set the font to something san-serif, big, and very readable, use view-mode (for ease of scrolling), and use bookmarks. I also make the Emacs full-screen; even the title bar goes off the screen.

    I do this on my laptop, and this helps.

    But usually, I prefer to use paper.

    • Personally, I use KVim [freehackers.org]. I set the font to something san-serif, big, and very readable, repeatedly use the 'j' and 'k' keys (for ease of scrolling), and use marks ("m[a-zA-Z]" and "m'"). I also make the KVim window really big, but not full-screen; I keep the title bar on the screen.

      I do this on my monsterous LCD monitor, and this helps.

      Usually, I prefer to save a tree [earthday.org].

  • Not a program, but a nifty device [4access.com] for the blind. Since it costs about $1600 (lots of moving parts in that tiny device) I'm accepting donations to help defray the cost.

  • GutenMark (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rabin Vincent ( 642528 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @04:32AM (#5359440) Homepage
    GutenMark [sandroid.org] is a GPL'd program to format Project Gutenberg files into LaTeX. From here on, this can be converted into PS or PDF (sample [sandroid.org]), 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.

    • Re:GutenMark (Score:3, Informative)

      by samjam ( 256347 )

      GutenMark is excellent, once it has chapter recognition for contents table linking directly yo chapters in it's HTML output it will be top notch

      If you take html output from GutenMark you can feed it to the free (as in beer, not speach) MobiPocket Publisher [mobipocket.com] you can then view the resulting compressed ebook practically on any platform including the new P800 using the free mobi pocket reader.

  • PostScript formatting (Score:3, Interesting)

    by turgid ( 580780 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @07:09AM (#5359739) Journal
    If you have something like gv (or ghostview) that'll read postscript documents, a2ps [inf.enst.fr] does a wonderful job of pagenating and formatting text of all kinds ready for printing to a Postscript printer or viewer. However, that doesn't solve your bookmarking problems. It should relieve some of the eye-strain, though.

  • Weasel for palm (Score:2, Informative)

    by Jason H. Smith ( 142884 )
    Put it on your handheld and use Weasel Reader [sourceforge.net]. IIRC, it was designed to read Gutenberg texts, and it was originally called Gutenpalm. Anyway, Weasel has all the usual features for ebook readers, and it uses zlib, so its texts are smaller than the PalmDoc native format. Very highly rated on palm.freshmeat.net.

    Also, it comes with programs to convert .txt files, so you can also use ps2ascii and read postscript or even PDFs.

  • Plucker [plkr.org] is a viewer for PalmOS, but I believe they were working on a viewer for X as well.

  • Emacs, part 2 (Score:2, Informative)

    by i0wnzj005uck4 ( 603384 )

    Someone already mentioned Emacs, but...

    It'd be trivial to bind a command to a key that allows the bookmarking of a file (ie, saving of a line number to .#filename or some such), and another jump-to-bookmark function as well. Heck, if you were feeling particularly l33t, you could extend normal text mode to do it for you (ebook-find-file automatically jumping to bookmarked line). As for fonts, it's quite simple to either change the fonts in XEmacs or (as I prefer) simply up the font size on your terminal emulator.

    The nice part about emacs is that you can also write a quick script to remove useless text, like the license stuff at the beginning, since most of it is standard cut-and-paste. Not that you'd want to distribute such an edited copy, but for your own personal use. Plus, it's not like you have to go download emacs from some site...

  • http://kickme.to/ebookfaq/

    look at the e-book readers section. You will find something you like on that page.

  • Here's how _I_ do it: Rocket eBook (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @02:28PM (#5361013) Homepage
    "How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?"

    Well, you asked... I have a number of scripts--they're written in Apple's MPW, but think "shell script" and "egrep" and you'll get the idea--that are specifically tuned to Project Gutenberg's format. Massages line breaks, provides true open and close quotes, and so forth.

    They output the particular restricted subset of HTML that's acceptable as input to RocketLibrarian. Then I use RocketLibrarian to download them into my Rocket eBook, which really has very good characteristics. The size is right (midway BETWEEN PDA and laptop) and the screen is very readable.

    Unfortunately... the Rocket eBook was acquired by a bunch of business geniuses at Gemstar who proceded to morph it into the REB1100, which is essentially identical to the Rocket EXCEPT that you can ONLY use it to read purchased (and expensive!) content. No "personal content" allowed any more.

    It's a pathetic mess and if I get started I'll rant for hours...

    But the bottom line is that I've NEVER been able to read comfortably from a fixed CRT sitting at a desk. And I've NEVER been able to read comfortably on cramped 160x160 pixel Palm.

    But reading from the Rocket, which I purchased mainly for the specific purpose of reading PG texts, I read pleasurably and comfortably for hours.

    It's a darned shame that the eBook industry has seemingly killed itself through greed and digital restrictions management.
    • Me too- it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. I suck Gutenburg texts, web pages, and other stuff straight off the web with Rocket Librarian. I actually bought the thing to use for web-based coursework when I was in school, and I still use it to store web pages I want to read on-the-road. I've also spent quite a bit on eBooks for the thing. GemStar royally fscked up when they took away the ability to load on personal content - I was all set to upgrade, and was chomping at the bit to get my hands on the new model until I found out they'd made this change. Gemstar didn't take the time to figure out how their new customers were using the product and lost a lot of them in the process.

      If you can get your hands on one of the original Rocket eBooks, I highly recommend it.

      • You can still create eBooks for the Rocket eBook with the 'rbmake' project: http://rbmake.sourceforge.net/
        Then import the .rb file via the RocketLibrarian, although you will probably have to convert the text to HTML before using 'rbmake'.
  • Really nice soft... http://tomreader.pisem.net/tom_setup.zip

  • Palm works great for me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pmuellr ( 213665 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @04:58PM (#5361733)

    Like other people suggested, I use a Palm. I've been using iSilo [isilo.com] 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.

  • or one of its clones ?

    after all can't you use emacs for EVERYTHING ?

  • cat document.txt | festival --tts!

    I like using text to speech synthesis software such as Festival [ed.ac.uk] to have text read to me while I work. Granted it's not always the most articulate, it gets 99% of the job done just fine..

  • "list" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jmaslak ( 39422 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @04:37PM (#5366143)
    DOS had a utility (not included with it, of course) called "LIST" which let you change colors and bookmark (IIRC). It didn't let you change fonts, but I have read lots of manuals with the program. It was basically "less" on steroids.
  • with ascii2pdf, you can specify font,size, margins.

    spits out a pdf file you can read with any pdf viewer.
    http://www.bulldog.tzo.org/ascii2pdf/ [tzo.org]

    txt2pdf is shareware.. more features..
    http://www.sanface.com/txt2pdf.html [sanface.com]

  • Good text readers.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by psycho_tinman ( 313601 ) on Monday February 24, 2003 @02:41AM (#5368867) Journal
    Try ETextViewer [freedownloadscenter.com], Tom's eTextReader [freedownloadscenter.com] or even Metapad (www.liquidninja.com ?)..

    I personally prefer Tom's eTextReader myself, have read some fairly large texts on it (Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman empire, for example). you can set background colours, it actually renders the pages like a book (double columns).. YMMV, but I read a lot of texts off the screen and I havent found anything better.. This assumes that you're using Win32, of course.

    For a Palm OS device, Weasel Reader rocks..

  • Why not vim? I regularly read works of quite some length in vim or emacs. Both editors run fine in an xterm with colours of your choise and have bookmarking capabilities.

    I've read quite a few books in xterms with -bg steelblue4 -fg #e8e8e8. Your preferred colours might vary slightly or a lot, but isn't it nice to be able to read a document in X11, bookmark it there, then open it later while on a virtual console and still be able to find the bookmarks? :-)

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