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→Current Features
* 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 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.
* 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 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.
* The Activity has an annotation feature that enables the user to attach notes to pages in the text. These annotations are stored in a pickle file that is included in the Zip file containing the document. When you share a document your annotations will go along with it. For the recipient it will be sort of like buying a used textbook that has all the important stuff already marked up.
* The Activity supports multiple bookmarks in a document, and easy navigating between them. This is in addition to the current feature that remembers where you left off when you last read a document.
== Using Text to Speech ==
== Using Text to Speech ==