Hey folks: I of course have an oppinion on all of this but am more interested in bringing a few issues up. It is true that a lot of hardware synths provide exception handling rules for pronunciation but manipulating those rules is often not trivial. The DoubleTalk family is an example. You can have exceptions but you need to compile those exceptions extermally and then download them to the synth at start up. As far as I know there is no compiler available for the DoubleTalk family in gnu/linux. Also, downloading firmware or exceptions adds another level of complication to synth initialization which can be frustrating as many DECTalk PC users can declare. So, you will need to either make exception handling software available for all the hardware/software synths or leave folks basically in the same situation they are currently. Even developing exception dictionaries for the various soft synths is not a trivial matter as anyone that has tried to make exceptions for espeak/espeakup will tell you. Fortunately, Jonathan has been very good at updating pronunciations when it's brought to his attention but what about the other soft synths like festival? So although it may be theoretically more desirable to hand-off processing to the individual synths the implementation is a whole lot more involved than central processing one time at the speakup level for all synths even if each synth might need to be slightly different. As for levels of punctuation for console output versus reading mode it isn't really that confusing once you understand it and it was a feature request which was written because of users desires. The code is already there so I don't quite understand the desire to remove the feature. If there is confusion I believe it is a documentation lack and not a difficulty with the implementation. I do aggree however that a direct synth mode should be available and I thought we had all decided that already. If it hasn't exactly been implemented so far then it is more a problem of developers not following through than nondetermination to have the feature. A toggle to turn processing on or off depending on users wish is a good idea but is not quite as easy to implement as one might think and that's why I suspect we're having this discussion. So those are my thoughts currently. Kirk -- Kirk Reiser The Computer Braille Facility e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca University of Western Ontario phone: (519) 661-3061
