text browser idea

surfing through documents with a downarrow?

[chewy]

I have to routinely look at lots of text documents in a row and find that the "browse" mode works well for emails and photographs, but there doesn't seem to be anything that would work for text files.

I'm sure others have this same issue.

for instance, (pardon the MS centricity) when looking at photos, you can use the MS image and fax "browser" that will allow one to view thumbnails of images - and click forward or backward.

I know something like this might be in Vista but hey, I'm not shelling out the dough until the other guys do all the beta testing!

as usual, this is for discussion, not name dropping or promotion. pls sticky me if you know of anything that does this that you can't discuss here...

(yes, I know this doesn't really qualify for WM General type topics, but I can't see where else it might fit in...)

(edit for clarification)

[bill]

I'm not really clear what you're looking for...
What's wrong with the text viewer you're using now?

If it's text you can certainly load it in your word processor and skim through it there.
You could even use NotePad with the Page Up & Page Down keys to accomplish that.
Another idea would be to make the file into a PDF and view it in Acrobat Reader.

[vincevincevince]

I understand what's being asked for here - some way to flick from one text document to the next easily, i.e. running through a directory.

Something like a 'close this document and open the next one in the directory' shortcut key.

This wouldn't take more than a few minutes for someone to build... I think it's a good idea. If I had the job to do I'd knock up a perl or PHP script to output to a web browser from a locally running web-server. A more friendly and general use method would be a quick VB application with a file list and a text object.

[chewy]

anybody seen anything like this?

- boy it would be fun to have such a thing written.

VVV got it right - sort of like hitting page up or page down to scroll through a directory by seeing whats IN the file rather than the file name...

select an object, strike a key, have it open, strike the key again and it closes and another one opens.

for word, or for txt or other types of files.

[bill]

I get it now. Thanks vince.
It sounds like something that could be done with a fairly simple macro. You could probably get a VB macro in Word to do this without getting too involved.

[lammert]

I am doing this more than ten years already with a DOS/Windows port of the Unix less program. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a port: just use a search engine and search for "less.exe".

You can skip to the next file with ":n" and the previous file with ":p". The only "problem" is that you have to open a command prompt to use it, so it looks a little bit old fashioned :)

[Beagle]

Still not quite sure if I'm understanding the question, but if I'm doing something like this in Word, I set the "views" menu on "preview". Of course, it only lets you see the beginning of the document without opening it; that's usually all I need, but if you need to scan the entire document it wouldn't be of much help (it'd be great if you could scroll in the preview window, but I haven't found a way to do that).

[MatthewHSE]

Irfanview will do this. The results aren't very pretty, but it works.