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FoldPage 1.12 — reading aloud, in its own voice

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@BEKO2210 BEKO2210 released this 13 Aug 02:43
· 2 commits to main since this release
v1.12
22ef144

FoldPage now reads aloud in its own voice. No second app to install, no
account, nothing leaves the phone.

What is new

  • FoldPage carries a speech engine. Reading aloud no longer depends on
    whichever engine the phone happens to have. A neural voice for your language
    is fetched inside the app — about 20 MB — and works offline from then on.
  • A language, then its voices. Pick a language and you see the voices for
    that language and nothing else: FoldPage's own first, the phone's below,
    each with a listen button before you keep it. 31 voices across 22 languages;
    two each for German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese,
    Polish and Russian.
  • The download is a real flow — size before the tap, a bar with bytes,
    cancel, one plain sentence and a retry when it fails, remove when you no
    longer want it, and a line saying what the voices take up altogether.
  • One control for the thing the app is for. The reader's six identical
    glyphs became a labelled Listen and three quieter buttons.
  • Articles got their typography back. Paragraph spacing and real headings
    had been flattened by a CSS reset; the scale is measured and guarded now.
  • Settings stopped being a wall — 3,288 px of bordered cards became 2,284 px
    of sections, and two columns from a tablet's width up.
  • No developer words on screen, checked on every build.

Fixed

  • Reading aloud produced audio nobody could hear: the player returned as soon as
    the samples were queued and then released the track. It waits for the last
    sample now.
  • An uninstalled speech engine made the app silent with nothing on screen to say
    so. A stored choice that no longer exists is forgotten and re-picked before
    the first word.
  • A failed download could delete a working voice. Installs are atomic.
  • The page could be dragged sideways and stay there.
  • The welcome screen showed machine voice names ("en-us-x-msm00013-local").

Install

Around 120 MB, because this APK carries the speech engine for all four
processor types. The Play build is split per device and downloads about 30 MB.
Voices are in neither — they arrive only when you ask for one.

Android 7.0 (API 24) or newer.

apksigner verify --print-certs foldpage-1.12.apk

Certificate SHA-256:
84:50:48:E1:19:8E:0C:8C:2C:88:34:68:CD:14:14:46:03:13:76:4A:4A:CB:C7:CE:3A:D0:46:99:B0:A9:72:72

File SHA-256:
9b595252950366170f732fffcca185aa24aa726c6c02b898c0a22da254c4154c

Under it

58 unit tests, 39-article extraction corpus, 148 rendered reader pages, a
browser pass over every route in four modes, an audit for developer words, 27
checks on the language → voice rule, 12 on keyboard operation, and a structural
accessibility audit — all green. What a machine cannot judge is listed as
unverified in docs/UI-BASELINE.md rather than implied.

Assets 3
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