rfc: speakup's character and punctuation processing

[Kirk Reiser]

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