Streak - a streaming text viewer
--------------------------------

(C) 2001, Paul Jimenez <pj@place.org>
Distributed under the GPL

>>What is this thing?

Streak is a text viewer.  It's made for reading
large textfiles on a small screen with minimal effort.

>>But... why?  why not just use 'more' or some other
>>ebook viewer for reading large text files?

I found that standard ebook viewers have a few problems
that interfered with my use of them being a pleasant
experience: 

   1) vertical scrolling is often jumpy causing
      me to lose my place in the text.  Also, no matter how
      good the scrolling is, my eye must move back and forth 
      as if the text is on a 'page'.  This too can cause me
      to lose my place when moving from one eoline to the next.

   2) Font size - to be able to fit enough on the screen
      for me to not have to scroll every few seconds, the font
      size must be so small that it's hard to read

Needless to say, streak has none of these problems.  It instead presents
text to you in a scrolling format, so that your eye must do minimal work
in trying to keep your place in the text (unless you forget to pause
while you look away).  The small amount of text presented also  means
that much larger (and more readable) fonts are therefore usable.

>>Well, okay, what else does it do?

The scroll rate is also very adjustable, from a crawl to... well, to
a streak.  

On June 21, 2001 adustable font size (from 8 to 48) was added.  The same
day also saw the addition of a 'progress' slider.

>>That's not much.  Surely it should do more.

Yes, it should.  The current wishlist includes:

* support for the various 'e-book' formats (right now only text files 
  are supported) including 'chapters' or whatever other 'booklike' 
  ideas they support
    * PalmDOC support
    * compressed text (.gz) support (ala zcat/zmore/zless)
    * PDF support (pulling the text from a pdf is reportedly not difficult)
    * HTML support (strip tags, but maybe grok font/bold/strong/em/italics
      kind of tags.  H1/H2/etc affect font
* 'bookmarks' that allow the reader to 'remember' a spot

Suggestions are of course very welcome.

  --pj

