Latest on Read Etexts and espeak

[James Simmons]

Tony,

I did some more work on Read Etexts this weekend and have published a 
bundle for version 8 on the Wiki.  I think that this, along with the 
instructions I provided for installing speech-dispatcher, should meet 
your needs.  If it does, tell your friends, if not, tell me.

A fellow named Alesky Lim who is working on the Sugar on a Stick project 
created a patch to add a Play/Pause button to the Speech tab.  His patch 
also refactored much of my code and introduced some bugs, which I was 
able to fix.  The new button makes it more obvious how to stop and start 
speech, and the checkmark button is still available for when the XO is 
in its ebook reader configuration.

I created new .po files for i18n.  The originals I had were just copies 
of the ones the original Read activity had.  I never tried to test them, 
and they would not have worked if I had.  I had assumed that i18n worked 
like the resource bundles in Java do, but they are a bit more complex 
than that.  I'm trying to get my stuff into pootle so all the strings 
can be translated.  I want to create a .po file for Nepali too, but I 
don't know the two character language code for that language.  When I 
figure it out I'll add it.

The problem with speech-dispatcher typing up /dev/dsp turned out to be 
an mplayer problem, not a speech-dispatcher problem.  I always compile 
mplayer from source so I can play every available codec, and while I 
compiled in support for ALSA in fact it defaults to using OSS, which it 
cannot do while speech-dispatcher is running.  If I try to force alsa 
with the -ao option it doesn't report any conflict but no sound comes 
out of the speakers.  Same thing if I compile in pulse-audio support and 
use that.  Maybe the problem is that I have more than one sound card 
installed.  In any case, what ever it is is not a speech-dispatcher 
problem and the XO should not be affected.

James Simmons


Tony Anderson wrote:
> James,
>
> I appreciate your work. It sounds like you are making great progress. 
> As  I understand the dispatcher, it acts as a daemon to allow multiple 
> applications to share espeak. I also hope it is not taking over the 
> sound channel completely.
>
> I am getting ready (read panic) for my trip to Nepal (leaving Monday 
> afternoon). I will be able to concentrate more on this when I get 
> there toward the end of next week.
>
> Tony