speakup direct option?

[Hermann]

Hi,
On 29.05.2009 15:16, Kirk Reiser wrote:
> The direct option is supposed to allow a softsynth like espeakup
> handle special characters and individual characters rather than
> attempting to do it uniformly like we've been doing in speakup for
> many years.
>
It works with Espeak in German, provided the version of the kernel is 
rather new; I've tested it with the latest GRML CD. It comes with kernel 
2.6.28-grml, and it works well.
On my desktop machine with GRML 2008-11 and kernel 2.6.26-grml it does 
not work, because I cannot write the direct file.

> We have been talking about it on-and-off for a while now on the irc
> channel and decided it needs testing so we can get the kinks worked
> out for languages other than English.
>
Note: You must use the -V option of your synth, e.g. the code for Dutch 
in Willem's case. Then it works.
Alternative: Copy your language file in /usr/share/espeak-data/voices to 
default.
In my case: cp de default

> For characters such as umlauts and other accents you would need to
> have the appropriate utf-8 character set loaded into the kernel.  If
> you have than thank you for the apraisal.  We realize it still needs
> work but without folks trying it we can't fix it.  Both William Hubbs
> and I are native English speakers and although I speak a little German
> I've not really played with getting my softsynth to use it so we
> really need patient help from speakers of other languages.

If I set the punctuation and read-punctuation level in Speakup to 4, I 
still don't hear all punct chars spoken in German.
In fact Speakup ommits most of them, among them important ones like 
quotation marks.
GRML uses UTF-8 for the system.
Hermann