This is a very quick attempt at writing a tool that will read a text file loud to you using an external tool, in this case Apple's say command available in any console on Max OS X. Ironically, this was written after reading Pieter Hintjens' book Social Architecture (much recommened) in some inspired meta-state of trying to automate what had just happend (or something like this).

This initial version maintains a bookmark per textfile to the last paragraph read and will, when rerun on the same file, repeat this last paragraph and continue reading from there.

The paragraph numbers are basically line numbers, not counting empty lines, but including also those lines that will actually not be read, because the are filtered, being comments or whatever.

You could record the audio by using ffmpeg or sox, which might be included in a future version... But it is very questionable if a real human can listen to larger amounts of text read by such a super-crude tool like this.

This code is not yet packaged or installable in any sense, being simply a prototype, and was tested only on Python 3.5.

The self-test shown below does actually run on the online version of Pieter's book mentioned above after fetching it first from github (this will use the requests package which is the only external dependency).

$ python filereader.py
filereader.py - Read a textfile using "say" (on Mac OS X).
Usage: filereader.py <textfile>
       filereader.py -t
Stop with ctrl-c.

Below the spoken textlines were wrapped manually in order to reduce the need for scrolling.

$ python filereader.py -t
Downloading "https://github.com/hintjens/socialarchitecture/archive/master.zip"...
Extracting "master.zip"...
Reading...
socialarchitecture-master/ch00.txt
(2) Preface

(3) The Wisdom of Crowds

(4) Niccolo Machiavelli observed, in "//Discourses on the First Decade
of Titus Livius//" that:

(5) "As for prudence and stability of purpose, I affirm that a people
is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment than a prince.
Nor is it without reason that the voice of the people has been likened
to the voice of God; for we see that wide-spread beliefs fulfill
themselves, and bring about marvelous results."

^C
Created/updated bookmark to para #5 for file
"socialarchitecture-master/ch00.txt" in bookmarks.json.