Monday, April 2, 2012
Pdf-To-Speech 9.5
As we continue to practice fast release cycles on Pdf-to-Speech, version 9.5 adds support for Microsoft Word (.doc). I used code from the Apache POI project to parse the .doc documents. The library works seamlessly and the feature is now part of the app.
There is an Apache POI library on code.google.com. However, the project does not seem to have too much activity. If other fellow developers are interested in the version we forked for Pdf-to-Speech, let us know and we will release the code under Apache 2.0 License.
Also, development on an Intent API to allow developer's apps to use Pdf-to-Speech is still an open proposition. However, we first need to see interest from fellow developers.
We are now focusing on providing features to increase user's access to their data, no matter where it is. And the addition of Google Docs-to-speech is still on the pipeline.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Pdf-To-Speech 8.9
The latest update of Pdf-to-Speech sports an automatic header and footer extractor. Thanks to B. Real feedback, we've added automatic footer and header extraction. The update is immediately available on the Android Maket and will be available on the Amazon Market soon.
For version 9.0 we plan to have ePub format support. A rebuild of the file loading tab is on schedule as well to make the tab focus more on the searching tool.
For version 10.0, we are pondering adding Google Doc's to speech. We welcome feedback on the usefulness of this feature.
As Real's feedback shows, we depend on your feedback to make pdf-to-speech a more useful tool for your every day needs. You can post your feed back as a comment on the Android or Amazon market, on this blog, or at Pdf-to-Speech's Google+ page here.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
How to take out footer And headers in your PDF
Follow this link to read a tutorial on the use of the Find/Replace tool in Pdf-to-Speech. The tool is useful to take out the header and footer from the PDF documents when read with text-to-speech. The tools is also useful to replace words with phonetical equivalents.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Pdf-To-Speech 9
On January 1, 2012 Pdf-to-speech 8.5 was released. The update addressed a force-close that was happening when the phone comes off standby while playing a pdf file. The settings tab was improved to comply with Android setting's standards. This year, the pdf-to-speech app will receive additional bug fixes to improve stability on multiple Android phones.
For version 9 of the Pdf-to-speech, I would like to release an Intent-based extension of the app that will allow other Android app developers to turn multiple other document formats to speech using pdf-to-spech's engine (epub, oppenoffice, etc). I will be releasing the API's and documentation on how to do this as the work is done. In the mean time, I welcome interest and suggestions by fellow developers.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Pdf-To-Speech 8
We have listen to users' suggestions and the most commonly requested feature is speed. So the next version, version 8, will have an experiment Pdf reader that can be three times as fast on a Galaxy S or comparable phone, and can be twice as fast on a Xoom or comparable tablet.
The figure to the right shows how long it takes for the app to load the first page of Moby Dick, a 1047 page document. On average, the reader will now take about 3 seconds to read any random page on the document (images and other media can delay the reader).
The update is almost ready. The feature will be provided as experimental because there are many PDF creators, and it will take some time to verify the Fast PDF reader can process multiple types of PDF files. So be sure to give us your feedback.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Pdf-to-Speech 5.0
We added OCR to Pdf-to-Speech. The app can now be used to read text in pictures that are embedded in a PDF document.
To use the feature. go to Settings and select Google Docs as the text extraction engine. A few things to note:
Upcoming updates will allow the app to read jpegs and pngs.
To use the feature. go to Settings and select Google Docs as the text extraction engine. A few things to note:
- Google OCR is in beta and a quota is in effect, so the service may stop as the quota is reached.
- Pdfbox, the default text extractor is better at reading Pdf's with columns than Google OCR.
Upcoming updates will allow the app to read jpegs and pngs.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Pdf-to-Speech 4.0 Release
Finally, version 4.0 has been releases. The major features added were:
- Bookmarks. They include the option to add a comment as suggested by one of the users.
- Tabbed GUI: The information was starting to get too crowded for a single minimalist screen. The tabbed GUI hopefully will keep things clear and still be minimalistic.
- Search: The load screen includes a search option that will help you find files on the phone or on the web. The web search will only look for pdfs on Google. Notice that a similar action can be done from your desktop adding the keyboard filetype:pdf to the end of your search query.
- Wait screen is gone: while the program was speed up, the real problem for users was not the wait, but being locked out of the app while the text is being extracted. The new implementation does this in the background, leaving the user free to exit the app, or browsing other tabs while the pdf is extracted.
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