Emacspeak News --History Of User-Visible Changes
$Id: NEWS-15.0 4047 2006-08-11 19:11:17Z tv.raman.tv $
Author: T. V. Raman <raman@cs.cornell.edu>

* Emacspeak 15.0 Additions And Changes:

Emacspeak 15.0 provides the following user level enhancements:

* Documentation:

** Online Manual:

*** New Chapter: Emacspeak Commands

The online info manual has a new chapter documenting all
 emacspeak commands. It is organized into sections, one per
Emacspeak source module.


*** Online HTML Version:

An HTML version of the Emacspeak manual produced by
texi2html is now available as 
http://emacspeak.sf.net/info/

** Productivity Tips:

A new document giving productivity tips for using the
Emacspeak desktop is available 
as file etc/tips.html in the Emacspeak source distribution,
and online as http://emacspeak.sf.net/tips.html.
The source files used to create tips.html is available as
tips.xml in the Emacspeak CVS repository.

** User Guide:

There is a new Emacspeak user guide, thanks to Jennifer
Jobbst of the IBM Linux Technology Center.
The user guide is available online at 
http://emacspeak.sf.net/user-guide and is also bundled with
the emacspeak sources in directory emacspeak/user-guide.
The user-guide files are also placed in the /usr/share/docs
directory by the Emacspeak RPM.

** Speech-enabled Applications List:

http://emacspeak.sf.net/applications.html gives a full list
of speech-enabled applications available on the Emacspeak
audio desktop.

** Doc Links in Customization Buffer:

The *Customizations* buffer created when
 customizing group `emacspeak'  contains hyperlinks to
available documentation and support resources.

* New Emacspeak Features:


** OCR Front-End:

Module emacspeak-ocr provides a convenient to use OCR
front-end for document scanning.
Uses SANE for image acquisition and can be configured to use
any available OCR engine.

** Productivity Tips:

Command emacspeak-view-emacspeak-tips bound to C-e cap T
brings up a productivity tips document.


** Speedch-enabled ECB:

ECB --Emacs Class Browser-- provides a powerful class
browser 
for aiding in software development using a variety of
languages including Java and Emacs Lisp.

** Semantic Support Within JDE

Uses knowledge computed by the semantic package in better
speech-enabling JDE.

** Speech-enabled browse-kill-ring

Module browse-kill-ring is speech-enabled.


** Easy Customization:

Most of Emacspeak user options are now available through
Emacs' customization interface --see command 
emacspeak-customize bound to C-e cap C

** Enhanced widget support:

The speech-enabler for Emacs widgets has been completely
overhauled.
This results in better speech-enabling of packages like
custom and JDE.

** URL Templates 


New URL templates for Sourceforge, DDJ TechNetCast etc.

** Websearch:

*** Single click access to speech-enabled Google advanced search.

*** Browsing Usenet archives from Google --command C-e cap U

*** Speech-enabled Usenet search from Google.

** Speech-enables ERC:

Enhanced with room monitors and the ability to hear things
said by specific people.

**Speech-enables ansi-color.el

Module ansi-color (bundled with Emacs 21)
colorizes process output according to ansi escape
sequences. Emacspeak 
maps these colors to appropriate ACSS style settings to
provide audio formatted output.

** Speech-enables MetaPost Mode:

metapost mode helps authoring and maintaining metapost
drawings.

** Transient mark mode:

Emacspeak  now works with transient mark mode.

** W3 and XSLT:

Emacspeak-w3 now provides the ability to apply an XSLT
transformation to HTML content before it is displayed.  You
can use this to simplify ugly HTML and leverage W3's ability
to render standard HTML.  This feature is also useful in
working with pages that use deeply nested tables.  See
directory emacspeak/xsl for some ideas on what XSLT can do.

Also, see command  emacspeak-w3-extract-table 
that uses this mechanism to extract a specific table out of
a WWW page.

You will need to install libxslt to use this feature.
See commands emacspeak-w3-xsl-toggle and
emacspeak-w3-xslt-select for details on how to use this
feature.

** Convenience Commands:

All Emacspeak convenience commands have been moved to module
emacspeak-wizards.

*** Annotation Tool:

emacspeak-annotate is a tool that lets you comments in a
designated annotation buffer as you work through a document.
I typically use this to collect comments into an email draft
while reading long documents --see command
emacspeak-annotate-add-annotation for details.




*** Simple phone book:

See command  emacspeak-speak-telephone-directory for a
simple phone book.

*** W3 url rewrite wizard:

There is a new command emacspeak-w3-url-rewrite-and-follow
bound to "y" in W3 buffers. This is useful in applying a URL
rewrite rule to the link under point before opening it.
This is most useful in jumping directly to printer friendly
versions of articles at popular sites like Yahoo and CNN.

*** Midi Icons:

Command emacspeak-toggle-midi-icons has been nuked.
In its place, key C-e M-a runs command 
emacspeak-set-auditory-icon-player which can be used to
interactively select the kind of auditory icons used.

** Key Bindings:

*** Personal keys:

 There is a new keymap emacspeak-personal-keymap
for user's personal keybindings --and available through
prefix key C-e x
To bind a command you would write 
(define-key emacspeak-personal-keymap "a"
'emacspeak-speak-other-window)
Alternatively, use the customize interface and customize
variable
emacspeak-personal-keys.

To accomodate this change, command emacspeak-view-register
is moved to C-e v
and command emacspeak-speak-version is moved to C-e V

** Viavoice Outloud:

The Viavoice Outloud server is now configured so that you
only need install the ViaVoice TTS RTK (Run Time Toolkit).
Note that you will need the Viavoice TTS SDK if you plan to
recompile the Emacspeak Viavoice Outloud server or build
other ViaVoice TTS applications.

**Emacs 21:

Emacspeak 15 works cleanly with Emacs 21's new features.
However, note that there are serious problems running W3
both the pre-release 4.0.46 as well as the CVS version of W3
under Emacs 21.  

CVS version of W3:

0) Aural CSS is broken
1) Tables are broken
2) There is a W3 timer bug that causes page download to take a lot longer


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