eSpeak - added punctuation and capitals indications

[Lorenzo Taylor]

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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.
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