Friday, August 25, 2006

Update: Emacspeak On Google Code Hosting

The initial experiment of moving emacspeak development to Subversion at Google Code Hosting has been largely successful. After a few bumps along the road, mostly a consequence of my being new to SVN, things are looking good, and I have stopped updating the CVS repository on SourceForge.

Some additional goodies as a consequence of the move to SVN:

  • SVN Tags contains snapshots of prior releases.
  • Future releases will come with an SVN Revision number that allows one to reliably recreate a released version.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Emacspeak Codebase Via Subversion From GoogleCode

I've checked in the Emacspeak codebase into the Subversion repository provided by Google Project Hosting . The project page is Emacspeak at GoogleCode. You can find Emacspeak --- complete with its code history going back to the point where I started using CVS at Emacspeak SVN Repository.

For now, the Emacspeak Web site will continue to live at Sourceforge; The Emacspeak mailing list will continue to live at Vassar as before. To checkout the code from SVN, follow the instructions on Emacspeak SVN. If you run into any hitches in checking out the code, please report it on the Emacspeak mailing list. Note that you can anonymous checkout the code from the above location entirely from the shell command-line without ever having to point a browser at anything.

Emacspeak users presently running out of SourceForge CVS might want to do an SVN checkout in a separate directory and make sure things work, in preparation for a permanent switch-over to svn. Here are the minimal steps you need to perform:

  • svn checkout http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ emacspeak
  • The above will create a directory called emacspeak with the code under it; obviously, you should do this somewhere different from where you have your current copy of emacspeak.
  • For now, I recommend renaming the directory created in the above step to svn-emacspeak so that you can easily tell which snapshot you're looking at.

Note that reading these is not a replacement for learning about SVN --- there is an excellent on-line book available at SVN Manual.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Zipping Through Web Pages

Zipping Through Web Pages With Emacspeak/W3

I just added an experimental zip through Web pages shortcut to emacspeak-w3. The command is called emacspeak-w3-speak-next-block and is bound to z in all W3 buffers. It is useful for quickly moving through Web pages that have logically separate content units in separate blocks where a block is one of:

  • HTML div.
  • HTML tables.
  • HTML p elements.

In general this provides an effective means of skimming many large Web pages.