Re: EMacspeak Windows

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

"Wilfred Zegwaard (privé)" <wilfred.zegwaard@home.nl> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Is there anyone who can help me to let EMacspeak run on a Windows machine?
>
> Thanks,
>

It is non-trivial to get emacspeak to run on a windows platform. The first
problem you will have is the TTS driver code. This is written in Tcl. So, you
will either have to install Tcl for Windows (and I don't know anything about
Tcl for windows) or re-write the Tcl code using another scripting language. How
difficult this would be depends on the TTS engine you plan to use. If its a
hardware synthesiser connected to a serial port etc, it probably wouldn't be
that hard. However, if its a software synthesiser, it cold be more difficult if
you want to embed the synthesiser into the driver code (which is how the
current Tcl drivers work for some of the software synths, like IBM's ViaVoice). 

If you are able to get Tcl working for windows, you will probably have to
modify the code to cater for platform differences in things like directory path
seperators, device names etc. One nice thing about Tcl is that it is possibly
the easiest language to link with a C/C++ library (i.e. for the software speech
synth). I briefly had a look at doing the same with Perl, but ran into quite a
few problems because the automated header generation didn't like the C code in
the library I was trying to link with. 

There was an emacspeak driver written in C as an experiment some years back, so
you could write one in C, C# or even Java, but you will need good (fast)
regular expression library. The driver code (i.e. Tcl library and scripts) is
pretty straight forward and it wouldn't e too difficult to translate that to
another language. Emacs communicates with the driver via stdout/stdin, so there
are no real complications there. 

In summary, theoretically, it can be done, but you need to come up with new TTS
drivers and whatever language you choose, it will need regular expression
support and possibly the ability to link with C and C++ TTS libraries or use
their APIs. 

There is an emacspeak mailing list at emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu 

HTH

Tim

 
-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au