Readers Pal

Reader's Pal is a program intended to ease reading on a computer monitor by displaying text in large fonts in foreground and background colors of the user's choosing. Sources of text include the windows clipboard, ascii text files, html files, drag-and-drop operations, zipped files and the internet. Among it's features are speed-reading, bookmarking, text-to-speech capability and text-only web browsing.

Requirements

Visual Basic 6 Runtime files

Optional Requirements

Internet Explorer 4 or 5
Font-smoothing
Microsoft Agent's Text-to-Speech

Downloads

readerspal33.zip

Starting with Win98, the Visual Basic Runtime 6 files are installed along with the operating system. If you have win95 or otherwise need it, download it here.

Font smoothing is included in Win98 and the Win95 Plus Pack. To find out if you have it installed, right click on the desktop and choose Properties. If there is a tab that reads Plus!, click on it and there should be a check box next to "Smooth edges of screen fonts." This does not need to be checked for Reader's Pal to take advantage of smoothing. The software just needs to be installed. For downloading and info about font smoothing, go to http://www.microsoft.com/opentype/grayscal/smoother.htm

If you don't have text-to-speech then go here and download a text-to-speech engine and the SAPI runtime binaries. There are different engines for different languages. You can install more than one. I have only tried American English and British English. The first engine you install will be the default. The "Select a Voice" menu item allows you to change the engine. I seemed to have fewer problems with the American English engine so it might be a good idea to install that one first.

Installation

There is no setup program. Unzip readerspal33.zip into a directory and run readerspal.exe. If version 3.0 is already on your computer, then just replace readerspal.exe and the settings and bookmarks will remain the same.

History

2/19/99 Reader's Pal Version 1.0 uploaded.

3/9/99 Reader's Pal Version 1.1
Bug fixes, a few minor tweaks.

4/2/99 Reader's Revenge Version 2.0
Text files load much faster now. Zipped text files will load. Added search. Name change. More minor tweaks.

3/28/00 Reader's Pal Version 3.0
Bookmarking database. Rewrote page mode code so the window fills with text accurately with no overflow. Support for text-to-speech from ms if it is available. Parsing of html. Text-only www browsing. Changed its name back to what it was originally.

11/28/01 Reader's Pal Version 3.1
Uses Visual Basic Runtime 6 instead of Visual Basic Runtime 5. Tidied up text-to-speech. The menu talks now.

2/3/02 Reader's Pal Version 3.2
Fixed bugs caused by the previous update.

5/30/02 Reader's Pal Version 3.3
Added a menu option to have the text-to-speech engine pronounce words that are in all uppercase. Instead of spelling "DOG", it will say the word "dog".
The F9 key works. It will start and restart text-to-speech.
Most importantly, the Common Dialog ActiveX control was removed and replaced with api calls. What this means is that if you downloaded the previous version and the program wouldn't run, this version will probably work. This affected older Win95 installations and maybe WinMe also or any win32 computer that had a wrong version of the above-mentioned control.

Nice reviews here and here from an excellent resource, The Screen Magnifiers Homepage.

readerspal@yahoo.com