Text Echo deals with a few special niches in the very big field of text editors and word processors. If you happen to need to do any of the things that it specialises in, it may be a useful addition to your tool set for working with text.

You may find Text Echo useful if

1. You often enter text into forms in web pages, or read the text, and find the text fields are too small, or want to spell check your text - see Echo and edit small web page text fields
   
   
2. You need a versatile tool to search and replace text in the source code for web pages, programs etc, or data in text format and text files (with extension .txt or .rtf).
   
   For instance if you often want to do a search and replace of the source code of all the pages in a big web site, TFE may be just the sort of thing for you. Or if you are a programmer, and often need to do a search and replace of all the code of your project. See Wild words search and replace and the following sections.
   
   One particularly useful feature of TFE for this sort of work is that you can use a shortcut Ctrl + B to save the file you are currently working on, and launch the appropriate program for it (e.g. a file viewer for a particular type of file, web browser, editor) by file association. If what you are editing is a batch file, then this will launch the batch file.
   
   
3. You want to do web site redirects of an entire web site - TFE happens to have this as a special feature. See Make Web Site Redirects
   
   
4. You are visually impaired and find it useful as a text magnifier e.g. to help read your e-mails. I am sure there are dedicated programs for you that are much better, and TFE has some major limitations at present - for instance at present it can't echo Word documents, or web pages shown in FireFox or Opera (I may possibly add these features later on if there is sufficient interest).
   
   However, that said, it could be useful on occasion as a text magnifier. When used in combination with the Windows Magnifier (Windows logo key + U) for text fields it can't echo, it may be useful for some with only slight vision impairment.
   
   It's advantage is that it does echo the text as a proper font rather than just as a screen magnifier (as some programs do). So the text is smooth, none of those jagged pixel edges. It can also change the font, and colours to ones you find easier to read. See Text magnifier or font and colour changer echo
   
   
5. You only need very basic word processing facilities - and find some of the other features useful such as the spell checker, wild words search and replace, etc.
   
   It can do some basic word processing type things. If you want to work with fonts and coloured text, with the text varying in size, and a few effects such as bold, italic etc - then you can do all those sorts of things. But you can't work on the layout of your document in any way apart from just varying the text and paragraph formatting etc.
   
   Be sure to save your documents in the Rich Text format to preserve the colours and fonts.
   
   
6. You want to spell check your documents using the Aspell Open Source Spell checker, and are interested in a nice friendly graphical front end for Windows - see Graphical Interface for the Aspell Spell Checker
   

Hopefully, what it can do, it does well. But, to avoid disappointment for those who may download the program and expect more of it than it is able to do, it may help to make clear what it's limitations are.

What Text Echo is not

It is not a word processor. You can't add images, or tables to your documents for instance, or customise the layout of the text on the page.

You can change the text colour and size, and what it can do, it does in a reasonably intuitive way. But if you do any advanced word processing you will soon exhaust its capabilities.

It can't read Word documents (.doc files).

However it can read documents if saved as rich text (.rtf files). Also you can save your documents from Text Echo as rich text, and open them in other programs.

It has limited support for unicode at present.

Unicode is the character set used for displaying most of the special characters and languages nowadays. A program that can handle unicode can display any character in almost any of the world's languages (with more added as time goes on) and almost any kind of special symbol for maths, music etc.

Text Echo can open and save rich text with unicode characters in it, and you can copy / paste a unicode character from another program or document into TFE, provided the current font has glyphs for a suitable part of the range of Unicode characters.

You can also use the shortcut keys in TFE to insert particular unicode characters.

You can also see the clipboard text in unicode.

But TFE can't echo web pages as unicode.

It also can't currently accept unicode characters for file names

Also you can't use unicode characters for the Search and replace options, or for the spell checker (because it is a non unicode build - the Aspell spell checker itself is able to handle unicode).

This does have the advantage that TFE can run on older operating systems such as Windows 95/98 which don't have unicode support built in.

My "to do" list for TFE includes the idea to do a complete unicode build - as an alternative download - which would be able to run on Win 2K and XP and later operating systems, and would be able to do those things - but that won't be for some time if I do it.

Freeware / Shareware status: Some of the features are free. Others are shareware features. See the descriptions of the individual features for details.

To read more about Text Echo, go on to:

Echo and edit small web page text fields

To get the program, download and install Text Echo

Download Text Echo

Press release:

top