Full screen Presentation (Waswhere am I on the screen? )

[Martin McCormick]

Chris Brannon writes:
> Right.  The "linux" terminal type is more or less the same as a VT100.
> If your terminal type is linux, and you connect via C-Kermit to something
> that wants to talk to a VT100, then you shouldn't have any problems
> with terminal emulation.

	I found the likely cause of the weirdness. It is a
timing issue. I did an experiment in which I started out with a
serial line speed of  38400 baud and the performance of the
speech was fairly normal. I then dropped the line speed to 600
baud and every single word was spelled. This is not the old
speakup contention issue which has been fixed for quite a while.
Instead, this is an issue in which speakup must decide when to
process a bunch of letters in to a word. There is a timer that
starts each time a character is received and lasts for a small
fraction of a second. If more text arrives during that time, it
is buffered. When the timer does time out, speakup has a chance
to form a word out of this newly-arrived text.

	In this day and age, 600 baud is about 60 characters per
second which is apparently long enough for the timer to think
that someone is sending single characters rather than whole
blocks of text.

The higher the speed, the better the speech. At 9600 baud which
is the speed of the FreeBSD serial console, speech starts to get
a little rough. I imagine that output from the installer program
is a bit bursty which makes for some weird speech. I seem to
recall reading about a timer one can set in speakup which may be
the one to tweak.

	Normally, this is not necessary but the data are flowing
in more slowly. Also, there may be little breaks in the serial
stream as even at 57400, there is a bit of an odd cadence to the
speech as it comes in.

	Thanks for everybody's help.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group