Note: HTMList 1.0j-2 (and later versions) includes RouteBook functionality; if you install it, you should remove RouteBook to avoid conflicts; a reboot may be necessary afterward. HTMList provides a Page Range command to allow selection of Current Page, All Pages or a specific page range.
Help books do not offer a routing button*/menu. For regular books, tapping the routing button pops up a menu with only Print Book and Fax (and HyperLink -- if HyperNewt is installed, to save a link/bookmark to the current document, using isbn and page number; and URL for Newt's Cape).
(*the routing button appears as an "envelope" icon at lower right, and is also known as the action button; it offers a list of communication-oriented "transports", and possibly other commands).
Route Book is a 2.1-only (i.e., MP2K, MP2100, eMate) extension that adds "text routing" capability to all books. The text routing menu may include:
Help books appear/behave differently from regular books. If an application provides a help book, it may be embedded in the application, or appear separately in the Extras:Help folder; you would typically open it via i:Help. To open the system help book, tap Assist, and "How Do I?" button. If Route Book is installed, a routing button should be visible at lower right.
There are two kinds of help pages:
If you tap the routing button on a content page (i.e., showing a Topics button), text from that page is used by the subsequent command you select (Beam, Mail, Speak).
If you tap the routing button on an outline page, you will see an error "nothing selected". (It would be possible to interpret this as "use text from the entire book", but I preferred to avoid delays/space problems for large books).
Each page in a regular book is content page (the overview button provides the TOC). The routing button behaves differently from a help book. Regular books already have a routing menu, i.e., for Print and Fax. However, text routing involves a different "data class" that generates a separate menu. The current approach involves tapping the routing button to toggle between the two different menus. (I agree that this is cumbersome, and I'd be glad to change it if another developer can offer some insights into how to merge/differentiate multiple data classes in a single menu while still supporting existing Print/Fax).
Each time you tap the routing button, you would see either the original routing menu, i.e., Print/Fax, or the text routing menu, e.g., Beam/Mail.
Note: you should not close a book during Speak (not sure what the problem is).
In an earlier version, the current "print format" (Current Page or Entire Book) was used to define the scope for text routing. However, this was non-intuitive, could not access the page range information, and caused problems if Entire Book was chosen, and later all of the text from a large book was generated. So, this version is limited to using only the current page.
Macintalk is unreleased, unsupported software from Apple, so no one officially has it. However, comp.sys.newton.misc newsgroup/archive mentions sites that may have it, or users (not me) who might email it to you. Here are a few sites that offered it recently:
You can change default speech settings under Inbox:i:Speak Text Prefs.
Some speech docs:
If you have installed Newt's Cape 1.6a-2 or b-2 (betas), you should not install Route Book until you obtain a newer Newt's Cape version 1.6c-2 (or greater), and reboot -- otherwise, book routing menus will interfere and not behave correctly.
Route Book was originally part of Newt's Cape 1.6a-2 (beta), but I decided to extract it as a separate extension so that other book users could benefit and it would be easier to update.
Route Book was created on the Newton with NewtDevEnv; it's 2.1-only.
Version 1.0 (17 Mar 1998)
It would be possible to create a version of Route Book for NOS 2.0; however, due to underlying, undocumented differences between NOS 2.0/2.1, it would work only for regular books (not help books), and would include only Mail (not Beam; and of course, not Speak).
Future: should preface for each page include author, copyright? should text include "picture" or "object" to indicate non-text elements? should formatted text be converted to RTF, or should speech emphasis be added, e.g., louder for bolder/large fonts (or perhaps associated with HTML tags in Newt's Cape)? substitute words for special unicode characters, e.g., bullet?
Route Book is freeware, and may be distributed freely as long as all of the files are included and unmodified.
© Copyright 1998-2017, S. Weyer. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
If you are interested in creating your own regular/help books from HTML, or would like to save any book as a NewtWorks document, (or just want to support my Newton software efforts), I encourage you to register for Newt's Cape.