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Spreadsheet applications present a two dimensional view of structured data
where the field values are (possibly) mutually dependent. On the Emacspeak
desktop, a speech-enabled spreadsheet application can be used to manipulate
such data-driven documents%
ranging from simple cheque books and expense
reports to complex investment portfolios. Where the traditional visual
interface to spreadsheets is typically independent of the semantics of the
data stored in the spreadsheet, the speech-enabled interface is derived from
the meaning of the various fields making up the data. When presenting such
information on a visual display, implicit visual
layout can be used to cue the user to the meaning of different data fields.
On the other hand, in the case of an actively scrolling auditory display, the
spoken output needs to explicitly convey both the value and interpretation of
the different data items. In addition, the interface needs to enable an
active dialogue between user and application where the user is able to query
the system about the possible meaning of a particular item of data. Finally,
the aural interface needs to enable multiple views of the display.
In the visual interface, such multiple views are automatically
enabled by the two dimensional layout combined with the eye's ability to move
rapidly around the layout structure. Thus, while viewing any particular row
of a portfolio, one can immediately see the current total value as well as
the net gain or loss.
The Emacs spread-sheet package dismal
can be retrieved from
ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/local/fox/dismal
.
Forms mode an Emacs mode designed to edit structured data
records like the line shown from file /etc/passwd
presents a
user-friendly visual interface that displays the field name along with the field
value. The user can edit the field value and save the file, at which point
the data is written out using the underlying :
delimited
representation. Mode forms provides a flexible interface to
associating meaning to the fields of such structured data files.
For details on it use, see the forms-mode section of the online Emacs
info documentation.
Module emacspeak-ocr
implements an OCR front-end for the
Emacspeak desktop.
Page image is acquired using tools from package SANE
(Scanner
Access Now Easy). The acquired image is run through the OCR engine if
one is available, and the results placed in a buffer that is suitable
for browsing the results. This buffer is placed in mode
emacspeak-ocr-mode
a specialized mode for reading and scanning
documents.
Emacspeak OCR mode is a special major mode for document scanning and OCR.
Pre-requisites:
Make sure your scanner back-end works, and that you have the utilities to scan a document and acquire an image as a tiff file. Then set variable emacspeak-ocr-scan-image-program to point at this utility. By default, this is set to `scanimage' which is the image scanning utility provided by SANE.
By default, this front-end attempts to compress the acquired
tiff image; make sure you have a utility like tiffcp
.
Variable emacspeak-ocr-compress-image is set to `tiffcp' by
default; if you use something else, you should customize
this variable.
Next, make sure you have an OCR engine installed and working. By
default this front-end assumes that OCR is available as /usr/bin/ocr
.
Once you have ensured that acquiring an image and applying OCR to it work independently of Emacs, you can use this Emacspeak front-end to enable easy OCR access from within Emacspeak.
The Emacspeak OCR front-end is launched by command emacspeak-ocr bound to C-e C-o.
This command switches to a special buffer that has OCR commands bounds to single keystrokes– see the key-binding list at the end of this description. Use Emacs online help facility to look up help on these commands.
Mode emacspeak-ocr-mode provides the necessary functionality to
scan, OCR, read and save documents. By default, scanned
images and the resulting text are saved under directory
~/ocr
; see variable emacspeak-ocr-working-directory.
Invoking command emacspeak-ocr-open-working-directory bound
to d will open this directory.
By default, the document being scanned is named `untitled'. You can name the document by using command emacspeak-ocr-name-document bound to n. The document name is used in constructing the name of the image and text files.
Here is a list of all emacspeak OCR commands along with their key-bindings and a brief description:
Interactively update image compression options.
Prompts with current setting in the minibuffer.
Setting persists for current Emacs session.
scanimage
.
* emacspeak-calc:: emacspeak-calc * emacspeak-dismal:: emacspeak-dismal * emacspeak-remote:: emacspeak-remote * emacspeak-entertain:: emacspeak-entertain