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420 bytes removed ,  10:58, 18 June 2009
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* Book sharing is supported.
 
* Book sharing is supported.
 
* The power management code from the core Read activity has been added, with a few minor changes, and seems to work OK.
 
* The power management code from the core Read activity has been added, with a few minor changes, and seems to work OK.
* A new feature is text to speech with Karaoke highlighting. The purpose of this is to produce a tool to help someone learn to read. Support for text to speech on the XO laptop is done using speech-dispatcher and espeak. Speech-dispatcher currently is not part of the software included on the XO, but can be easily added using Yum.  You do '''not''' need speech-dispatcher installed to use Read Etexts, but you will of course not have text to speech working unless you do.
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* A new feature is text to speech with Karaoke highlighting. The purpose of this is to produce a tool to help someone learn to read. Support for text to speech on the XO laptop is done using a gstreamer plugin for espeak. This plugin currently is not part of the software included on the XO, but is installed on Sugar on a Stick.  You do '''not''' need this plugin installed to use Read Etexts, but you will of course not have text to speech working unless you do.
* The latest release supports both speech-dispatcher and the not yet released gstreamer espeak plugin, which should be included in future versions of Sugar. This provides much better performance for text highlighting and requires no configuration.  If you want to get a really inadequate preview of what Speech with highlighting will be install speech-dispatcher, otherwise wait for the gstreamer espeak plugin.
   
* The Books toolbar lets you search for books in Project Gutenberg's offline catalog.  Enter in words that you would expect to find in the title or author of a book, then press Enter.  A table will appear in the lower half of the screen listing book titles and authors that contain all of the words.  Select a book from that table and click the download button and the book will arrive in a minute or so.  The download tries to get the best available version of the book.  For instance, it will try to download an 8 bit version of the book, and if there is none it will try to get a 7 bit version.  (8 bit files contain accents and diacritical marks; the 7 bit versions do not.  Not every text has both versions).
 
* The Books toolbar lets you search for books in Project Gutenberg's offline catalog.  Enter in words that you would expect to find in the title or author of a book, then press Enter.  A table will appear in the lower half of the screen listing book titles and authors that contain all of the words.  Select a book from that table and click the download button and the book will arrive in a minute or so.  The download tries to get the best available version of the book.  For instance, it will try to download an 8 bit version of the book, and if there is none it will try to get a 7 bit version.  (8 bit files contain accents and diacritical marks; the 7 bit versions do not.  Not every text has both versions).
 
* You can download several books to the Journal in one session.  Each book will be given a Journal entry when it downloads.
 
* You can download several books to the Journal in one session.  Each book will be given a Journal entry when it downloads.
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