I am pleased to associate my open source projects with the "Raising the Floor" initiative, located on the web at http://RaisingTheFloor.net This is the broadest community initiative I know on technology access regardless of disability or economic position. participation is a way of enabling human potential at an international level. The spirit is hopefully expressed in the latest improvements to EdSharp and FileDir, which make significant improvements in international support, help options, and 64-bit compatibility, among other areas. Jamal ---------- Improvements that apply to both EdSharp and FileDir are described first, followed by those particular to each application. Additional help options increase ways of learning these applications through both study and discovery. Control+F1 is a new command that toggles a key describer mode in which pressing a key describes its action. Switching to another application window also turns off the mode automatically. In general, the wording of command names in EdSharp and FileDir has been made more consistent, thereby aiding memorization. As before, complete documentation is available in your default web browser with F1, and a summary of hot keys is available with Alt+Shift+H. The Alternate Menu command, Alt+F10, now shows descriptions of commands as well as their names and hotkeys. As before, you can filter what commands are shownin the listbox, e.g., press Control+F for filter, type the *copy* string, and press Enter to show only commands related to a copy operation. Press Control+Shift+F to clear the filter, showing all commands again. Recent changes were made for compatibility with 64-bit Windows. An exception, however, is that the JAWS scripts to refine speech should be manually installed on 64-bit Windows at present, rather than by marking the checkbox at the end of installation. To do this, choose the Explore Settings option from the JAWS program group of the Windows Start Menu to find the user script folder, and then unarchive the file called ed_scr.zip or dir_scr.zip from the appropriate program folder, e.g., C:\Program Files\EdSharp\ed_scr.zip ---------- EdSharp 3.1 http://EmpowermentZone.com/edsetup.exe Bugs have been fixed in the following EdSharp commands: Right Brace (Control+Shift+]), Next Part (Alt+PageDown), Prior Part (Alt+PageUp), and Yield Encoding (Alt+Shift+Y). Press Alt+Shift+F7 for a new EdSharp command that translates all or selected text from one natural language to another via the Google API. You pick the source and target languages. Google limits the text to about 500 characters per translation. EdSharp can now convert English braille files with .brl or .brf extensions to plain text, e.g., files from BookShare or NLS. This is done by calling the NFBTrans utility in the background, a free braille translater and back translater published by the National Federation of the Blind and available on its web site http://nfb.org The conversion of compiled HTML format, .chm files, is also significantly improved by incorporating a new version of the CHM2TXT utility, which is also available seperately at http://EmpowermentZone.com/chm2txt.zip CHM format is widely used for software documentation, and may often be found by exploring the folder and subfolders where an application is installed, generally C:\Program Files\ApplicationName Press Control+Shift+O, specify the path to a .chm file, and obtain a result in structured text format, placed in a new document window. Several commands that perform comparisons now can be configured to examine text items other than lines. Accordingly, the commands have been renamed to include the word Items instead of lines: List Different Items (Alt+Shift+L), Keep Unique Items (Alt+Shift+K), Order Items (Alt+Shift+O), Number Items (Alt+Shift+N), Query Common Items (Alt+Shift+Q), and Reverse Items (Alt+Shift+Z). The default delimiter between items is the \n character, indicating a line break (ASCII 10). This may be changed to any string. For example, to compare sections of a structured text file instead, press Control+Shift+C for Configuration Options, and Alt+S for the SectionBreak setting. Since the text is initially selected, press Control+C to copy it to the clipboard. Then press Alt+L for LimitItem, Control+V to paste, and Enter to save settings. To try the new setting, choose History of Changes from the Help menu (Shift+F1), which opens a structured text file describing changes in EdSharp over time. By default, the sections are in chronological order, so the most recent changes appear last. You can reverse the order by pressing Alt+Shift+Z. As before, output from the Say Time (Alt+Semicolon) and Insert Time (Alt+Shift+Semicolon) commands can be adjusted with the DateFormat and TimeFormat configuration settings, which follow template conventions of the .NET Framework. The value of 0 is now also defined as a way of telling EdSharp not to use that component in its output. This lets you use just the date or time if you want. As before, the NavigatePart setting is a regular expression for moving among routines in source code. It is used by Alt+PageDown and Alt+PageUp to go to the next or previous function, method, or class definition, based on the current compiler in use. A new command, Go to Part (Alt+Shift+G), presents these locations in a list, giving you an overview of the code structure and a way to pick a location. ---------- FileDir 3.7 http://EmpowermentZone.com/dirsetup.exe As before, when an archive file has focus in FileDir, pressing Enter presents a view of its items that is similar to a directory view. You can now choose to open the archive with another program instead by pressing Shift+Enter. This runs the default program associated with the file extension in the Windows registry, e.g., WinZip or WinRar. A new command, Alt+Shift+F4, restarts Windows after prompting for confirmation in a standard message box. ---------- End of Document ** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:guispeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe] ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** guispeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:guispeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq] ** or send a message, to ** guispeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq