Emacspeak News --History Of User-Visible Changes
Author: T. V. Raman <raman@adobe.com>

* Emacspeak 8.0 Additions And Changes:

Emacspeak 8.0 adds speech-enabled support for the following
Emacs packages:


** Customizing Emacs: emacspeak-custom.el

Custom allows you to customize Emacs using a simple 
direct manipulation based interface.

**  Buffer specific navigation: emacspeak-imenu.el

Imenu produces a buffer-specific table of contents 
that allows you to move through  a buffer efficiently.

** Java Development Environment: emacspeak-jde.el

The JDE package provides an integrated development
environment for developping and debugging Java software
using Sun's JDK and associated tools.

** Browsing Software: emacspeak-speedbar.el

Speedbar provides a powerful tree-structured browser for
quickly navigating through large software modules. Speedbar
currently supports many programming languages and is fully
integrated with the JDE.

** Browsing Multiple Mail Spools: emacspeak-mspools.el

The mspools package allows you to monitor multiple maildrops.

** Developing Python Software: emacspeak-python.el

Speech-enabled Python mode lets you develop Python code
effectively in an eyes-free environment. This is a good
example of Emacspeak's power --Python uses white-space for
block structure and would be a hard language to program in
using speech without Emacspeak.

** Dired Improvements: emacspeak-dired.el

Emacspeak now provides useful hotkeys in dired buffers for
speaking specific items of information such as file size.

** Running Remote Emacspeak Sessions: emacspeak-remote.el

Enhanced Emacspeak's interface to remote speech servers by
adding the ability to guess the name of the host from which
you connect.

** Terminal Enhancements: emacspeak-eterm.el

The terminal extension now provides the ability to cut and
paste between terminals.  See commands
emacspeak-eterm-copy-region-to-register and
emacspeak-eterm-paste-register for details.

** Speech-Enabled Menubar Support: tmm-menubar

Emacs 19.29 and later provide pull-down menus.  These are
useful to get the new user exposed to the various facilities
that are available.  These pull-down menus are now fully
speech-enabled.

** Enhanced Navigation In Completion Buffers:

You can now navigate the *Completions* buffer by using the
alphanumeric keys to jump to the first completion that
starts with a particular letter.

** Emacspeak Clipboard: 

Emacspeak now provides a simple clipboard for exchanging
information between different Emacspeak sessions. This is
very useful if you run simultaneous Emacspeak sessions on
different hosts on the same network.  See commands
emacspeak-clipboard-copy and emacspeak-clipboard-paste for
details.

** Emacspeak Dictionary: 

The Emacspeak pronunciation dictionary --along with other
resources used by Emacspeak (such as the Emacspeak
clipboard)-- are now stored in directory $HOME/.emacspeak

** Spoken Messages:

Spoken messages, e.g., appointments now pause ongoing speech
rather than stopping it.

* Emacspeak Developments:

** Windows NT:

 Emacspeak 8.0 works on Windows NT using an as yet
unreleased speech server. I will announce availability of
this server when I am ready to release it.

** MBROLA:

Bart Bunting and I have put together a preliminary Emacspeak
speech server for the MBROLA speech synthesis system.
This is not yet ready for production use mostly because
MBROLA still has problems --see file mbrola.txt in the
Emacspeak distribution. An experimental copy of this server
is included in this release;
however it is an experimental release and you should use it
at this time only if you are  
in a position to contribute improvements. Please do not send
 any bug reports.




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