If you have ever sent: Thu Mar 23 14:04:45 est 2000 to a voice synthesizer, you were probably confused by the resulting stream of abbreviations and digits. And if you didn't know (in advance) that the output represented a date/time, the speech would be as comprehensible as ancient Greek. Clearly we need an intelligent text preprocessor that translates "computer English" into standard English. If the above had been run through such a preprocessor, you might hear: march twenty third two thousand at 2 o 4 PM eastern standard time. I have developed a text preprocessor that contains these features, and many more. It is integrated into my Jupiter speech system, cleaning up everything I hear. but it is also a stand-alone capability. It can be folded into anybody's speech package, or a specific application such as a document/email reader. If you are interested, please visit http://eklhad.hispeed.com/linux/prep_tts/prep_tts.html Thanks, Karl