Getting Started with Premier E-Text Reader

Transcription

1 The Basics Getting Started with Premier E-Text Reader Open up the document you d like to read. E-Text Reader can read any of the following types of documents: Microsoft Word (*.doc), Rich Text Format (*.rtf), Hypertext Markup Language (*.htm or *.html), Text (*.txt), or Extensible Markup Language (*.xml). Note: If you need to read a PDF file, you will need to use Premier PDF Magic. Instructions are provided in another document on this website. Once you ve opened your document, you can change the font, the text size, the zoom, etc. Choose the voice that you d like to hear by clicking the Voices icon at the top of the screen, or by going to Read > Voices. You can select from a handful of different voices, and adjust their rate and pitch to whatever levels work best for you. To read the text, place your cursor where you d like to start and click the Read icon at the top of the screen. Each word will be highlighted as it is spoken. When you d like to stop, click the Stop icon. Continued on Next Page: Bookmarks

2 Helpful Features Bookmarks Maybe you ve highlighted or made a note of something because you figure it s important and you ll need it later. Maybe you just want to make it easier to skip from chapter to chapter. Using the Bookmarks feature is a good way to easily move from place to place in your text without having to scroll through the whole thing trying to rediscover something. When you find something you d like to Bookmark, place the cursor at the start of the text and click the Mark icon at the top of the screen. This symbol should appear before your text: ß Done! To move from one Bookmark to another, use the Prior and Next icons at the top of your screen. You can remove a Bookmark by deleting the ß, the same way you would delete a regular letter in a word processor. Continued on Next Page: Color/Extract

3 Color/Extract Color/Extract is a great tool that can help you take notes or create an outline by allowing you to easily pull sections of text from your document and organize them in a new one First, find the text you d like to highlight and use the Color icon to choose your highlight color(s). Select the text you d like to extract, and then click the Highlight icon. Once you ve done your highlighting, click the Extract icon. At this point you can choose which of your highlights to extract Yellow, Blue, Pink, Green, All, or just whatever is currently selected. Click Extract and your text will be placed in a new document, which you can save as a Microsoft Word file (*.doc). Note: If you are extracting text from a large file, this may take a few minutes. Done! Continued on Next Page: The Problem with Color/Extract

4 The Problem with Color/Extract (And How to Get Around it) Premier E-Text Reader is a great tool, but like most things, it has some downsides, too. Hopefully this will save you some frustration. Every Extract action must have a new document. You know how you can highlight text and extract it to a new document? Great, right? Here s the catch: If you ve already extracted some text and then go to extract more, it will overwrite what you already have: That was easy! Now I ve got all this important stuff in one place! Hey, this is a pretty good bit, too! I m going to add it to my extracted quotes. Nooo! All of my important pink highlights are gone! What am I going to do? Continued on Next Page: What You re Going to Do

5 Let s say that your first extract was all pink highlights. Save that as a Word Document, then close the Extract window. For your next extract, choose another color here we ll go with green. Now you can do the same thing over again save the green into its own Word Document, close the window, then extract blue. OR, you can copy & paste the green into the document full of pink highlights. Once this multi-colored document is saved, you can even re-open it in E-Text Reader and have it read to you. It is kind of a hassle, it s true. One thing that might make it easier is trying to organize your thoughts by color. Say you re going through Harry Potter trying to come up with a good description of the Harry Potter universe. Put the characteristics of our heroes in blue, the Hogwarts history in yellow, Muggle studies in pink, and go with green for He-Who-Must- Not-Be Named and his cronies. Now you ve got a document full of all the Harry Potter facts you ll need in order to write a vivid descriptive essay. Of course, this is just a suggested fix, and if there s something that works better for you, then you should absolutely do it whatever makes your studying easier! We hope this has helped you learn a bit about how to use the E-Text Reader. Now get started! LSS AK 6/22/2010