`woman' can't be used outside emacs?

`woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Ronald]

hope not...

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ronald <followait@163.com>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:31:25 +0800
> 
> hope not...

`woman' is an Emacs Lisp package, so it can only be used inside Emacs.

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Ronald]

> `woman' is an Emacs Lisp package, so it can only be used inside Emacs.

lisp is really interesting. 

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Ronald]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Ronald <followait@163.com>
>> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
>> Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:31:25 +0800
>>
>> hope not...
> 
> `woman' is an Emacs Lisp package, so it can only be used inside Emacs.

Emacs tries to do almost everything when it is possible.
I can't understand why it does this way.
Maybe I should learn some lisp first.

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Charles philip Chan]

On 21 Dec 2006, followait@163.com wrote:

> Emacs tries to do almost everything when it is possible.
> I can't understand why it does this way.

It doesn't make sense if you think of Emacs as just a text editor. A
more helpful way is to think of Emacs as a LISP machine:

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

which specializes in manipulating text streams. In fact this is how
Emacs was designed. It consists of a small core (LISP interpretor and
functions where speed is essential) that is written in C. The rest is
implemented in Emacs LISP.

Charles  

-- 
panic ("Splunge!");
        linux-2.2.16/drivers/scsi/psi240i.c

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Tim X]

Ronald <followait@163.com> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> From: Ronald <followait@163.com>
>>> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
>>> Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:31:25 +0800
>>>
>>> hope not...
>>
>> `woman' is an Emacs Lisp package, so it can only be used inside Emacs.
>
> Emacs tries to do almost everything when it is possible.
> I can't understand why it does this way.
> Maybe I should learn some lisp first.

Its a matter of taste really. Emacs isn't (for most) just an editor -
thats why the icon often seen associated with it is the "Kitchen sink"
- as in the expression "Everything but the kitchen sink". Some people
think this is great, others think its rediculous. 

To put things in a bit of context though - emacs was doing a lot of
very cool stuff while many other users were struggling with quite
limited shells and window managers with very little functionality (or
in a basic console). At this time, it was really very useful to be
able to do different things without having to exit your editor or
suspend it or shell out to do things like check your mail, surf the
web or look at man pages. 

Others argue that emacs goes against the Unix philosophy of having
utilities/programs that do one thing really well and you obtain higher
functionality by linking them together with various shell facilities
and scripts etc. 

At a couple of conferences I've been to, they have had competitions
and games in which there are usually two teams - emacs on one side and
vi users on the other. These two groups sort of reflect the different
philosophies. 

To some extent, with virtual consoles, window managers with virtual
desktops and the increased sophistication of many apps, it can be
harder to justify using emacs for everything. However, I like the
constant standard interface and the ease with which you can move data
from one app to another without leaving emacs. for example, I use
planner-mode quite extensively because it allows me to manage all my
project information in one place and I can easily create hyperlinks
from project pages to e-mail messages (VM), contact database (bbdb),
web pages (w3m), text files (bookmarks), calendar/diary, time
tracking (timelog), gnats etc. 

The other thing is that once you get to know elisp, extending or
changing emacs' functionality is so easy, its just simpler to do it in
emacs than actually develop something else - especially as often the
most boring and time consuming part of creating a new app or bit of
functionality is the interface and with emacs, most of this is already
done. I even know people that use emacs as their window manager under
X - instead of an exec fvwm (or whatever) in their .xsession file,
they have an exec emacs. As a blind user, I use a package called
emacspeak, which provides sophisticated speech feedback that allows me
to do things that under Windows I could only do with an expensive
commercial app. 

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Robert Thorpe]

Ronald wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> From: Ronald <followait@163.com>
> >> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> >> Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:31:25 +0800
> >>
> >> hope not...
> >
> > `woman' is an Emacs Lisp package, so it can only be used inside Emacs.
>
> Emacs tries to do almost everything when it is possible.
> I can't understand why it does this way.

One of the reasons is that it's old.  In the past there weren't many
mail programs/news programs etc.  Writing them within Emacs was useful
because it made them portable to fairly much all the system that Emacs
worked on.

Another reason is that once features have been written into Emacs
there's little reason to ditch them.  The autoload system ensures that
they don't make Emacs any bigger or slower, and the way lisp works
ensure that any bugs they contain are very unlikely to affect other
parts of Emacs.

I think that some of these auxilliary bits of Emacs are useful and some
aren't.  I ignore the ones I don't like and use the ones I do.

> Maybe I should learn some lisp first.

You might find it interesting.  As Charles Chan said Emacs may be
thought of as rather like a Lisp machine OS.  It not quite the same
though, since most of it's capabilities are connected with editing.

It's also quite similar to the Java system.  It provides a language
environment, Emacs Lisp, for writing programs that deal with editing.
These programs are portable between Emacs's running on different
platforms.  Like the Java virtual machine there is an interpreter and a
bytecode form for packages/libraries of code. (One of the authors of
Java wrote his own version of Emacs long ago, perhaps this is related).

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ronald <followait@163.com>
> Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:37:48 +0800
> > 
> > `woman' is an Emacs Lisp package, so it can only be used inside Emacs.
> 
> Emacs tries to do almost everything when it is possible.
> I can't understand why it does this way.

In this case, the reason is that `man' is unavailable on MS-Windows.

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Dieter Wilhelm]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:
>>
>> Emacs tries to do almost everything when it is possible.
>> I can't understand why it does this way.
>
...
>
> To some extent, with virtual consoles, window managers with virtual
> desktops and the increased sophistication of many apps, it can be
> harder to justify using emacs for everything. However, I like the

No it isn't harder to justify, in my opinion.  Since Windows 3.1 I was
used to open more and more applications in parallel.  Since working
with Emacs (which made me to adapt to Gnu/Linux in private) I'm in the
process to replace more and more file managers, terminals and what not
with Emacs "applications".

>
...
>
> The other thing is that once you get to know elisp, extending or
> changing emacs' functionality is so easy, its just simpler to do it in
> emacs than actually develop something else - especially as often the
> most boring and time consuming part of creating a new app or bit of
> functionality is the interface and with emacs, most of this is already
> done. I even know people that use emacs as their window manager under
> X - instead of an exec fvwm (or whatever) in their .xsession file,

I'd love doing this but my font size of the virtual consoles is too
big.

> they have an exec emacs. As a blind user, I use a package called
> emacspeak, which provides sophisticated speech feedback that allows me

Are you completely blind?  So that the emails must be read for you by
emacsspeak?  Then the usual way of "citing" (including snippets of
older mails) in mailing lists must be very disturbing for your hearing
experience.  How are you dealing with this and quotations and acronyms
and capitalization and ...?

-- 
    Best wishes

    H. Dieter Wilhelm
    Darmstadt, Germany

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Tim Cross]

From: Dieter Wilhelm <dieter@duenenhof-wilhelm.de>
Subject: Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?
Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2006 13:35:22 +0100

> >
> > The other thing is that once you get to know elisp, extending or
> > changing emacs' functionality is so easy, its just simpler to do it in
> > emacs than actually develop something else - especially as often the
> > most boring and time consuming part of creating a new app or bit of
> > functionality is the interface and with emacs, most of this is already
> > done. I even know people that use emacs as their window manager under
> > X - instead of an exec fvwm (or whatever) in their .xsession file,
> 
> I'd love doing this but my font size of the virtual consoles is too
> big.
>

Possibly I misunderstand your point, but under X, you can set the font
size either through xrdb or the emacs command line or through
customize. Under the virtual consoles on Linux, you can reduce the
font size as well - you don't have the same choices as under X, but
you can change it so that instead of an 80x25 display, you can have a
(I think it is) 180x32. At one stage Redhat Linux actually had this as
the default. From memory, you do this via an option in lilo (not sure
what the procedure is with other boot loaders like grub). 
 
> > they have an exec emacs. As a blind user, I use a package called
> > emacspeak, which provides sophisticated speech feedback that allows me
> 
> Are you completely blind?  So that the emails must be read for you by
> emacsspeak?  Then the usual way of "citing" (including snippets of
> older mails) in mailing lists must be very disturbing for your hearing
> experience.  How are you dealing with this and quotations and acronyms
> and capitalization and ...?
> 

I'm not completely blind - hey estimate I have around 1%, but that is
a guess really as my sight is poor enough to make determining how good
it is nearly impossible. I cannot read books or the computer screen,
but I can see distorted colour. To some extent, its a bit like looking
through frosted glass (like you find in bathrooms etc). 

One of the features of emacspeak which makes it stand out from
commercial screen readers is that it has a different philosophy.
Rather than just providing "dumb" speech feedback, emacspeak uses an
approach called voice-lock, which is like font-lock, but instead of
using different colours, it uses different voices or changes the
tone/pitch of a voice to provide more information. For example, cited
text will be spoken in a different voice, capital letters at the
beginning of a word causes the word to be spoken in a higher pitch,
words that are all capitals are spelt out (as they are often an
acronym) etc. You can set the system to ignore punctuation, speak some
punctuation or speak all punctuation - so, if I'm reading text, I
might set it to no punctuation or perhaps some punctuation. If I'm
programming, I will set it to speak all punctuation. 

In addition to using different voices, emacspeak also uses auditory
icons - a blank line causes a specific tone to be generated, opening a
new window causes another sound to be played, etc. I also take
advantage of features in programs like gnus which will allow me to
"fold" cited text, so that the buffer is narrowed just to the new text
etc. 

At the moment, I'm trying out new mail/news programs. This message is
the first one I have posted with the 'mew' mail/news reader for emacs.
I normally use VM, but lately, I'm getting problems with VMs ability
to handle some MIME types - in particular, attachments sent from MACs
using apple mail. However, I have to do a fair amount of work before
mew will give me adequate speech feedback. Essentially, this involves
adding advised functions with defadvice that adds speech feedback to
the app. 

Tim

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Dieter Wilhelm]

Tim Cross <tcross@rapttech.com.au> writes:
>
> Possibly I misunderstand your point, but under X, you can set the font
> size either through xrdb or the emacs command line or through
> customize. Under the virtual consoles on Linux, you can reduce the
> font size as well - you don't have the same choices as under X, but
> you can change it so that instead of an 80x25 display, you can have a
> (I think it is) 180x32. At one stage Redhat Linux actually had this as
> the default. From memory, you do this via an option in lilo (not sure
> what the procedure is with other boot loaders like grub). 

You are right, I had a blackout, at this stage I'm already under X, It
is only the window manager which is suppressed, there is no need to
configure the font size of the virtual consoles.  I will give it a try
with Emacs as my window manager.

>
> One of the features of emacspeak which makes it stand out from
> commercial screen readers is that it has a different philosophy.
> Rather than just providing "dumb" speech feedback, emacspeak uses an
> approach called voice-lock, which is like font-lock, but instead of
> using different colours, it uses different voices or changes the
> tone/pitch of a voice to provide more information. For example, cited
> text will be spoken in a different voice, capital letters at the
> beginning of a word causes the word to be spoken in a higher pitch,
> words that are all capitals are spelt out (as they are often an
> acronym) etc. You can set the system to ignore punctuation, speak some
> punctuation or speak all punctuation - so, if I'm reading text, I
> might set it to no punctuation or perhaps some punctuation. If I'm
> programming, I will set it to speak all punctuation. 

This is very interesting.  Can you skip to the end of cited text
during the playback, what happens when there is text in parentheses or
3 subsequent full stops (as continuation or omitting sign), is the
dash considered as a punctuation?

>
> In addition to using different voices, emacspeak also uses auditory
> icons - a blank line causes a specific tone to be generated, opening a
> new window causes another sound to be played, etc. I also take
> advantage of features in programs like gnus which will allow me to
> "fold" cited text, so that the buffer is narrowed just to the new text
> etc. 

Are there any guidelines, for example, from the emacspeak package for
making email responses to visually handicapped people more efficient
and clear.

-- 
    Best wishes

    H. Dieter Wilhelm
    Darmstadt, Germany

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[Tim X]

Dieter Wilhelm <dieter@duenenhof-wilhelm.de> writes:

> Tim Cross <tcross@rapttech.com.au> writes:
>>
>> Possibly I misunderstand your point, but under X, you can set the font
>> size either through xrdb or the emacs command line or through
>> customize. Under the virtual consoles on Linux, you can reduce the
>> font size as well - you don't have the same choices as under X, but
>> you can change it so that instead of an 80x25 display, you can have a
>> (I think it is) 180x32. At one stage Redhat Linux actually had this as
>> the default. From memory, you do this via an option in lilo (not sure
>> what the procedure is with other boot loaders like grub). 
>
> You are right, I had a blackout, at this stage I'm already under X, It
> is only the window manager which is suppressed, there is no need to
> configure the font size of the virtual consoles.  I will give it a try
> with Emacs as my window manager.
>
>>
>> One of the features of emacspeak which makes it stand out from
>> commercial screen readers is that it has a different philosophy.
>> Rather than just providing "dumb" speech feedback, emacspeak uses an
>> approach called voice-lock, which is like font-lock, but instead of
>> using different colours, it uses different voices or changes the
>> tone/pitch of a voice to provide more information. For example, cited
>> text will be spoken in a different voice, capital letters at the
>> beginning of a word causes the word to be spoken in a higher pitch,
>> words that are all capitals are spelt out (as they are often an
>> acronym) etc. You can set the system to ignore punctuation, speak some
>> punctuation or speak all punctuation - so, if I'm reading text, I
>> might set it to no punctuation or perhaps some punctuation. If I'm
>> programming, I will set it to speak all punctuation. 
>
> This is very interesting.  Can you skip to the end of cited text
> during the playback, what happens when there is text in parentheses or
> 3 subsequent full stops (as continuation or omitting sign), is the
> dash considered as a punctuation?
>

"Out of the box" emacspeak doesn't have a huge variety of specific
ways of handling this sort of thing - in fact, much of what it does
have are features the main author has found useful and added to the
software. However, this is essentially emacs, so it is fairly trivial
to customize the system to meet your own specific needs. For example,
you can define functions which will hide cited text fairly easily
(gnus already has this sort of capability), or you can define
functions to skip cited text etc. I find that using things like
emacspeak's built-in support for browsing by paragraph is sufficient.
Emacspeak does have built in rules which you can customize to handle
things like lines of characters generally used for decoration. For
example, if I have a line of more than 4 = signes, emacspeak will say
either "equals sign x times" where x is the number of repeated
characters rather than saying "equals" 80 times, or you can configure
it to just ignore lines like that (which is what I generally do). For
some common repeated characters, such as ..., you can map it to some
specific spoken words, etc. Often, such as when running VM, instead of
speaking all the text on the summary line, it will just speak the bits
you want to hear, such as who the mail is from and the subject,
ignoring the date and information about the number of lines in each
part of the message etc. However, all of this is customizable and you
can set it up how you prefer.


>>
>> In addition to using different voices, emacspeak also uses auditory
>> icons - a blank line causes a specific tone to be generated, opening a
>> new window causes another sound to be played, etc. I also take
>> advantage of features in programs like gnus which will allow me to
>> "fold" cited text, so that the buffer is narrowed just to the new text
>> etc. 
>
> Are there any guidelines, for example, from the emacspeak package for
> making email responses to visually handicapped people more efficient
> and clear.
>
No not really. Actually, I'm not convinced this is a good idea anyway.
In my opinion, I think it is better for the blind user to adapt rather
than require others to adapt. While everyone should try to ensure they
are using formats that are accessible (in that the blind user can get
the "raw" data), requiring authors/writers/composers to write in a
specific way for anyone with a disability is never going to work, plus
I think the emphasis should be with the blind user adapting to the
real world rather than the real world adapting for blind users (who
are in the minority anyway). As long as the blind user can access the
text, they can manipulate it into a form that suits them in a similar
way to how sighted users may configure their editor to use fonts or
colours that suit them. It also isn't that practicle for the non-blind
user to try and adapt for the needs of the lbind user - for one thing,
there is no such thing as the one cannonical blind user - we all have
slightly different needs and preferences. Also, if you are writing to
a number of different people, some of which may be blind and some may
not, which should take preference or how are you to know. Essentially,
when writing, the only thing you should need to consider is how to
make what your writing clear and ensure it expresses what you mean.
This in itself is often more difficult than you would expect.

Tim
-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: `woman' can't be used outside emacs?

[LEE Sau Dan]

>>>>> "Dieter" == Dieter Wilhelm <dieter@duenenhof-wilhelm.de> writes:

    Dieter> Are you completely blind?  So that the emails must be read
    Dieter> for you by emacsspeak?  Then the usual way of "citing"
    Dieter> (including snippets of older mails) in mailing lists must
    Dieter> be very disturbing for your hearing experience.  

Why?  Don't you know that Gnus highlights citing from different people
wiht  different colours?   (Gnus has  been doing  so for  a  long time
before  this has  become a  "standard" feature  among  other news/mail
readers.)

And don't  you know that  Emacspeak maps different text  highlights to
different  voices in the  text-to-speech engine?   So, you  hear plain
text read in  one voice, *bold* text in another,  /italic/ in a third,
etc.  If  you're editing a C/C++/Java/whatever  program, Emacspeak can
read out the reserved word  in one voice, class/type names in another,
variable names in  a third, function names in a  fourth, comments in a
fifth, etc.

I know this  because I've tried Emacspeak using  IBM's ViaVoice speech
synthesizer, which used to be  free.  (I can't find the link anymore.)
It's really amazing!  :)


    Dieter> How are you dealing with this and quotations and acronyms
    Dieter> and capitalization and ...?

Maybe,  you can  answer your  own questions  by trying  out Emacspeak.
Whether it can use different voices depends on what speech synthesizer
you're using.  I  have never got Festival to render  as many voices as
ViaVoice.



-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦                          ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee