Hi Jürgen, Anne, and Others, I also generally keep my mouse cursor set to ignore other cursors for more stable behavior, unless I'm working in an app with transitioning accessibility, where having the cursors track can help in the navigation. Anne, I'm surprised that input from French Mac users, who are a pretty large community, hasn't been given more attention at Apple with regard to the pronunciation issues of accented characters in PDFs in Preview. I recently suggested to Mike Busboom that he might want to get Voice Dream Reader on his iPhone in addition to Read2Go, when he posed a question here about continuous reading. Although I gave him a number of reasons that I thought this would be of interest to him, since he likes to read German books and documents using the Infovox/iVox voices, I didn't mention that one advantage would be having the accented characters in PDF documents read correctly! There was a post a month ago on the AppleVis forums from a Brazilian iPhone user who was complaining about the fact that accented characters for Portuguese and Spanish PDFs weren't read correctly in iBooks, and hadn't anybody noticed this. He'd already spent a lot of time trying to solve this by performing conversions to ePub format, without much success in getting this simply and successfully done, and was annoyed that this problem persisted. Were there any PDF reader apps for the iPhone that didn't have this problem? I told him to contact accessibil...@apple.com, and that unfortunately, I didn't have a good solution short of using an ePub version of the text in iBooks, or getting Voice Dream Reader to read the PDF content on his iPhone with Portuguese and Spanish voices obtained through in-app purchase at $1.99 each.
If you look in the archives, you'll see that Rafael Bejarano raised the question a few times whether people found the original Preview running in Tiger to work better than the versions that ran in Snow Leopard and later versions of the Mac. The changes in reading order of columns and tables (where VoiceOver reads all the elements in the first column, then all the elements in the second column, etc.) came in the later operating systems. If I use Preview on my G4 PowerBook that dates from 2005, columns read find, and the navigation is stable, although there are far fewer options. I used to wonder whether Apple switched the default format of the "VoiceOver Getting Started Guide" on their accessibility web pages from PDF to HTML, because it would have been embarrassing to have the columns of VoiceOver commands listed in the Appendix tables read out of order with VoiceOver in the later operating systems, when the PDF version of the guide was used instead of the HTML version. For simple cases of tables, such as the ones listed in the Appendix, I can use the free, third party pdftotext program from Carsten Blüm's installer packages pages: http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/packages/ (This is not signed for Gatekeeper, so you need to OK it's installation on Mountain Lion systems) Three months ago I had some off-list exchanges with a member of the Mac-access list who wanted to read his PDF bank statements on the Mac, and sent him the following AppleScript to test, based on the pdftotext program. This uses switches to keep strings in stream order ("-raw") and maintain the original physical layout ("-layout"). The AppleScript is just a wrapper around the "pdftotext" command so it can be used from the GUI, since "pdftotext" runs from the terminal command line: ---Cut Here--- (* Use pdftotext to create a text version of the selected PDF file in steam order Created 26 January 2013; modified from PDF to Text AppleScript of 17 May 2011 *) on run tell application "Finder" set chosenFile to the selection as alias end tell do shell script "/usr/local/bin/pdftotext -layout -raw " & quoted form of POSIX path of chosenFile end run ---Cut Here--- This did work for Paul's banking statements, but not for some other, more complicated PDF documents. You're welcome to use it if you want. You can either paste the sample AppleScript code into an AppleScript Editor window, with the option of playing around with the code, and just Command-tab between AppleScript Editor and Finder to select a file in Finder, then use Command-r to run the AppleScript in the AppleScript Editor. Then you can save the final AppleScript to the Library/Scripts folder of your account (e.g. Command-Shift-g then type or paste in "~/Library/Scripts" for the folder location. Or alternatively, you can just save the script directly into the ~/Library/Scripts folder under your user account after testing it with Command-r, without making modifications. Either way, the script will then be available from the "AppleScript" menu of your services menu bar (accessed with VO-m-m or Control-F8), assuming that your preference menu for the AppleScript Editor has the box checked for "Show script menu in menu bar" under the General tab. So you should be able to highlight your a pdf file in Finder, navigate to the AppleScript menu (VO-F8, arrow to menu, then arrow down and press the first letters of the script name), then press return to run the script on the file. This should produce a text file of the same name as your selected file under the same directory. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Apr 18, 2013, at 10:23 AM, Jürgen Fleger wrote: > Hello Anne, > > I agree that one can have the impression you described below. > > Fortunately There are no issues concerning german umlauts, not yet on the > Mac. There are issues in iOS. Since version 6 VO can't read umlauts anymore > and nothing happened so far to solve it. > > Yes I've already tried to play with the cursor settings, without any success. > Once a member of the accessibility team told me they changed the pdf engine > of Preview what could cause the issues. But next time another member told me > no, he wouldn't think so. > > Sometimes I have the impression there are no blind members in Apples > accessibility team. To me - who uses the Mac nearly exclusively - there are > some problems totally obvious but when I ask the accessibility team for help > they are not even aware of the issue. Once we tried something out. We sent > the same bug report twice and received two completely different answers. Very > strange, isn't it? > > Really, I love my Macs and I don't want to switch to Windows again. And so > I'm so interested in making the Mac even better. And so I just hope, they'll > take our reports more serious in the future. > > All the best > Jürgen > > Am 18.04.2013 um 19:40 schrieb Anne Robertson <a...@anarchie.org.uk>: > >> Hello Jürgen, >> >> For the jumping around problem, have you tried turning cursor tracking off >> or setting the mouse cursor to ignore the other cursors? >> >> Do you also find that in Preview, letters with an umlaut have the umlaut >> separated from the letter? This is a problem with accented letters in >> French. It's also true of accented letters in file names. >> >> My husband and I put together a very comprehensive report on this problem a >> couple of years ago, but nothing has come of it. I think we'll have to dig >> it out and send it to Apple again. >> >> Sometimes I think that other languages are a low priority for Apple. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Anne >> >> >> On 18 Apr 2013, at 17:42, Jürgen Fleger <apple-engl...@fleger.net> wrote: >> >>> Hi Nicholas, >>> >>> at first: I'm using Preview in OS X 10.8.3 Mountain Lion and it's a >>> catastrophy. I'm really experienced how to use programs on the Mac but I >>> can't understand why some people in this list say it's good to use. I also >>> discussed the issue with an Apple Senior Adviser and he confirmed all my >>> issues in a phone call. We went through the issues step by step. I guess >>> the satisfied users use Preview in Snow Leopard or Lion. >>> >>> Here's what I criticize on Preview in Mountain Lion: When I interact with >>> the text area and use VO + arrow up or down, right or left, the VO cursor >>> jumps around in the text. It's especially obvious in the head area of a >>> letter where you have the addresses. When I read a normal text line by line >>> it works partially but at some point VO beginns to read ends of the former >>> line once more and mixes lines completely. Not to speak about pdf files >>> with a certain structure like columns or tables. It doesn't matter what >>> view I use. I'm not sure wether this might be an issue of the german >>> version of Preview but a lot of my friends also complain about that. They >>> are as annoyed as I am. >>> >>> That's what I don't like about Preview. >>> >>> All the best >>> Jürgen >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
