A program to help dyslexics read

To help dyslexics read a document on their computer screens, I'm writing a program to isolate words and phrases in a moveable, resizeable rectangle to make the letters stay put. Should I use the graphics header file to include a function to draw the rectangle or is there a better way to do that?

I'm eager to hear your thoughts about any aspect of the project, especially the hardest one, making to pogram with with many document formats. But since I still need to invent an algorthim, I'm ignoring, say, what data structures to choose. The more thoroughly I plan the project, the better it'll go. The sooner I code, the more bugs I'll need to squash.

Thank you for your help.

Which OS are you planning to support?

For example
Microsoft Active Accessibility - Win32 apps | Microsoft Docs

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Originally Posted by BillMcEnaney

To help dyslexics read a document on their computer screens, I'm writing a program to isolate words and phrases in a moveable, resizeable rectangle to make the letters stay put. Should I use the graphics header file to include a function to draw the rectangle or is there a better way to do that?

I'm eager to hear your thoughts about any aspect of the project, especially the hardest one, making to pogram with with many document formats. But since I still need to invent an algorthim, I'm ignoring, say, what data structures to choose. The more thoroughly I plan the project, the better it'll go. The sooner I code, the more bugs I'll need to squash.

Thank you for your help.

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This sounds like an interesting project.

There are many document formats. They all need specialised libraries to parse and extract the text data. I'd advise you to ignore them or you'll spend all your time fiddling with formats and none on the important part of the program, which is the visual interface for people with dyslexia. So just support plain. txt files for now. Once you have proof of concept, you can show your program to the dyslexia people, maybe to Microsoft Word team, maybe make a lot of money out of it.

You'll probably neeed a GUI to draw the rectangle and put the phrases in aspecial font inside them. So your best bet is probably Windows GDI - the old and simple Windows graphical interface. Learning to write a Windows program is quite complex, but so is any other GUI interface.

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Originally Posted by Salem

Which OS are you planning to support?

For example
Microsoft Active Accessibility - Win32 apps | Microsoft Docs

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I hadn't thought about that, Salem. But I'm sure the program would work properly on any plaform where the user needs to read plain ASCII text. You may already know that I'm a Unix guy who runs Windows only because I need it when I proofread for a publisher. So the platforms you mention are new to me.

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You'll probaby neeed a GUI to draw the rectangle and put the phrases in aspecial font inside them. So your best bet is probably Windows GDI - the old and simple Windows graphical interface. Learning to write a Windows program is quite complex, but so is any other GUI interface.

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That's a frightening thought for me because I adore a Unix coomand-line. :) Seriously, I do prefer a command-line and I've never tried to design a GUI. So I suspect writing a Microsoft GUI will be the hardest part of my conceptually easy project.

In college, I needed to write a simple text editor where the computer stored text lines in a doubly linked list. That program was fairly easy to write. Tokenizing a line is simple, too, but the GUI intimidates me a little.