-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Jonathan Duddington: # I've added the ability to indicate punctuation and capital letters in # the text by either speaking their name, or by playing a sound. # # I'm not sure whether what I've done is exactly what's wanted, so if # anyone wants to try it and let me know of suggestions for improvements, # please do so. Got it. I'm trying it now. # Capital letters can be indicated by a sound, or by the word "capital", # or by raising the pitch of the capitalized word. This seems to work, but when raising the pitch, once the first capital letter is encountered, the entire text is spoken as capitalized instead of a single letter or word. # Questions which I'm unsure about: # # 1. Should end-of-line be indicated? No. Even in proofreading, this is not needed, since a proofreader would most likely be reading a line at a time. # 2. What about apostrophes within words. Currently these are not # indicated when speaking text since that would disrupt the pronunciation # of the word. Apostrophes in words should be spoken if they are set with the --punct option. When --punct is used without any characters, the apostrophe should be spoken just like any other punctuation character. Otherwise, they should not be spoken. # 3. The punctuation name is spoken in a slightly different tone from # the main text, to differentiate it. Is that OK? I like this. It is a feature that is currently lacking in every other synthesizer implementation. # 4. The actual names for punctuation characters are defined in the # data/english_list file, so these can be changed if needed (then do # speak --compile). Thank you! Finally I am not bound to a single person or group's perception of the way a punctuation character should be pronounced. If I want to think outside the box and create my own unique pronunciations for punctuation characters, I can. Speakup itself has actually made allowances for changing pronunciation of single characters, but since eSpeak is being used for things other than just Speakup, this feature is very useful. # 5. If the text is spoken at a fast rate, should the sound icons also # be shortened in duration? Probably not, but it could be an option in the /usr/share/espeak-data/config file. If a sound icon is a click or a beep or a similar short sound, I wouldn't want to speed it up. But if it is a voice indicator like a word or something, it might be useful to allow it to play faster if the speech rate is fast. # 6. What is the best value for the pitch raise which indicates # capitals? This is currently adjustable with the -k option to allow # experimentation. Keep it that way. :-) Different people will have different ideas about this, so it's best to let each person decide how he or she likes it. # 7. How should multiple capitals in a word be indicated? Or a capital # which is not the first character of a word? Or does that only need to # be considered when speaking letters individually (spelling)? Other than the mixed-case split (pronouncing each part of a word that starts with a capital letter as a separate word) that eSpeak already does, only single letters should be indicated as being capitalized. For the most part, we only need an indication that a letter is capitalized when we are reviewing 1 letter at a time. # 8. Have I misunderstood the whole point of this, and punctuation and # capital indications are only needed when spelling out individual # characters? No. You haven't completely missed the whole point. Though capitalization indicators are usually only needed when spelling individual characters, there are several reasons why someone might need to have punctuation spoken while reading lines or blocks of text. Programming and proofreading come to mind immediately. The punctuation levels should probably be added to the embedded commands as well. While I'm on the subject of the new eSpeak test, it seems that a new oddity has popped up. It seems that a z at the beginning of the first word of text to be spoken is now pronounced with a major lithp. :-) It only happens with the first word of the text, all other z's are pronounced normally, and it is pronounced normally if it is anywhere at all other than the first letter of the first word. For example zero by itself is spoken with a lisp. unzip is spoken normally. zero zero six the first zero is spoken with a lisp and the second is spoken normally. This also applies to the number 0. If the first character in a block of text to be spoken is a 0, the 0 is spoken with a lisp, and all other 0's and z's are then spoken normally. Thanks for all your improvements, Lorenzo - -- You have literary talent that you should take pains to develop. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFESnGWG9IpekrhBfIRAuZcAJ4+tHGFamCUqHgRdrQu22uQuN5k3wCgovj9 Bfpo6Yth1mMmGFBJBbHq6WA= =l0no -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
