[Sur] New versions of Read Etexts and View Slides

[Jim Simmons]

The usual automatic announcement went out to the Sugar-Devel list but
Tomeu suggested mentioning something here too.

The latest View Slides can now extract an image from a slide show and
make a Journal entry with the correct MIME type.  This was something
that someone asked for awhile back.  The need was to be able to
distribute a collection of images such that individual images could be
extracted and used to create a Memorize game, for example.

View Slides also supports annotations and bookmarks (but not
highlighting) much like Read Etexts does.  I also fixed lots of bugs.
I'm not saying ALL of them, but a lot.

Read Etexts has a new filter script that lets you read ebooks in RTF
format.  This is useful to read the books in the Baen Free Library,
which contains current and near current science fiction titles that
you can download and read for free.  Of the formats available for
download, RTF is the easiest to support.  I just convert it to a plain
text file on the fly.  The conversion is not perfect, but it is quite
readable.  So in addition to reading Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and
Stanley G. Weinbaum our learners can also read _The Two Faces of
Tomorrow_ by James P. Hogan and other good stuff.

I'm always interested in feedback on these Activities as well as the
Get Internet Archive Books Activity.  All three are available on
http://activities.sugarlabs.org.  There are screenshots demonstrating
what these Activities can do, and Read Etexts even has a movie linked
to its web page.

James Simmons