Ministrel, your very own storyteller

Ministrel is a Qt app to read to read out story books.

Here is the github repository https://github.com/soumen08/Ministrel

The github repository has a README towards the bottom explaining the app’s usage and installation.

Get the source from here, and then follow the installation steps mentioned in the README.

If you’re interested in the latest code, you can clone the git code by doing –

git clone git://github.com/soumen08/Ministrel.git

cd Ministrel/

qmake

make

make install

Now to why I wrote the app. I love listening to my novels. It allows me to do other things while still reading the novel. I used to use espeak on the command-line before, but deleting the text till where I had read (so that I could carry on from there) is very annoying. When I learnt Qt, I figured one thing I could do with it is to simplify novel reading for myself and for the community.

Ministrel has evolved very much from how it began. The idea throughout has been to increase functionality while not compromising on efficiency. It would have been far simpler to implement Ministrel in python, but I chose C++ and stuck with it so as to get to the lightest fastest app I could.

Ministrel at this point only supports text files. People have observed that it would be better if it could also support pdfs and a few other common formats. I shall be working on that when I have the time. In the meantime, you can use any pdf reader to export the pdf to plain text. Also I recommend the Project Gutenberg website for a large collection of free books(very good ones) available in text form.

Have fun with it and drop me a line at soumen08 at gmail dot com for any queries or suggestions.

Merry Christmas!