Best free text editors
Free online service removes line breaks from text and more
Ever wanted to remove hard line breaks in some text? Want to convert all uppercase text to lowercase? Need to strip out tabs? You can do all of this and more for free using this terrific online service. Definitely worth bookmarking.
http://www.textfixer.com/tools/remove-line-breaks.php
Free text-to-speech plug-ins
Here are some freebies. They all just use the standard robotic sounding Microsoft voices, but you can't complain at the price.
The first is CLiCk [1], an open source plug-in for Firefox. It has multi-language capabilities and supports a number of standard TTS interfaces, which means that you can install a wide range of commercial voices to replace the free but maddening Microsoft voice. Installation is straightforward, provided you read the instructions. Usage is wonderfully simple; just click an icon to start reading a webpage from the cursor location or a highlighted block of text. Press another icon to stop. I couldn't find any recording ability, though.
There is another Firefox extension called SpokenText [2] that will record to your disk but that's all; it can't read text like CLiCk. The voice quality is good because it uses a web service for the conversion, but that also means you need to be online to use it.
Windows XP comes with a standard feature called "Narrator" that will read any open Window, including Internet Explorer. Although standard in XP, it has to be set up for it to function; details can be found here [3], [4]. I played with it a while back and was under-whelmed with the voice quality. I've read that the Vista version of Narrator is an improvement, but frankly I haven't tried it.
Subscriber Radan Vasulin wrote in to point out that the Opera browser has in-built text-to-voice capability. It's not a standard feature; you do need to install the voice add-in [5]. Again, it just uses the Microsoft voices, but in this case you can't plug in higher quality commercial voices.
[1] http://clickspeak.clcworld.net/features.html[2] http://www.spokentext.net/firefox_ext.php
[3] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306902
[4] http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_tips590.html
[5] http://www.opera.com/voice/
Text to speech revisited
Here are some freebies. They all just use the standard robotic sounding Microsoft voices, but you can't complain at the price.
The first is CLiCk [1], an open source plug-in for Firefox. It has multi-language capabilities and supports a number of standard TTS interfaces, which means that you can install a wide range of commercial voices to replace the free but maddening Microsoft voice. Installation is straightforward, provided you read the instructions. Usage is wonderfully simple; just click an icon to start reading a webpage from the cursor location or a highlighted block of text. Press another icon to stop. I couldn't find any recording ability, though.
There is another Firefox extension called SpokenText [2] that will record to your disk but that's all; it can't read text like CLiCk. The voice quality is good because it uses a web service for the conversion, but that also means you need to be online to use it.
Windows XP comes with a standard feature called "Narrator" that will read any open Window, including Internet Explorer. Although standard in XP, it has to be set up for it to function; details can be found here [3], [4]. I played with it a while back and was under-whelmed with the voice quality. I've read that the Vista version of Narrator is an improvement, but frankly I haven't tried it.
Subscriber Radan Vasulin wrote in to point out that the Opera browser has in-built text-to-voice capability. It's not a standard feature; you do need to install the voice add-in [5]. Again, it just uses the Microsoft voices, but in this case you can't plug in higher quality commercial voices.
[1] http://clickspeak.clcworld.net/features.html[2] http://www.spokentext.net/firefox_ext.php
[3] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306902
[4] http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_tips590.html
[5] http://www.opera.com/voice/
Modify Web sites the easy way
If, like me, you look after various Web sites, you'll know how tedious it can be when you need to make a minor modification to a file on a web server. Download the file with ftp, modify it, and then re-upload. There are programs available that let you edit a file directly on the server but they're not cheap.
PSPad is a freeware text editor for Windows that has a built-in FTP facility, so you can edit files in place on a Web server. Once you've configured the program so that it knows the ftp username and password for your server, then opening, editing and saving a file on that server is as easy as if the file were on your local hard disk.
Although PSPad works great as a standard editor for plain text files, it also has built-in syntax highlighting for languages such as HTML, PHP and C. So if you are developing a PHP-based site, for example, and you want a perfectly capable development environment that won't break the bank, a good look at PSPad is highly recommended. Especially as it's totally free.
The program's already been downloaded more than a million times, and a new version is just around the corner, so the number of users is sure to increase as word spreads about just how useful a program it is. Freeware, All Windows versions, 3.43MB.
http://www.pspad.com/en/