Possible work around to the hardware synthesizer problem

[Shawn Kirkpatrick]

I've written a program that will allow hardware synthesizers to be used with 
speakup even thoe the serial support seems to be currently broken. I wrote 
this program about a year ago when I thought this problem would be only 
temporary. Since it seems like the hardware synthesizer support is still 
broken and isn't going to be fixed anytime soon I thought I'd put it out 
there in case it can be of some use.
The program is called speakupbridge.
speakupbridge is a program which makes it possible for speakup to use
external serial, parallel, or usb synthesizers. It does this by reading
speakup's softsynth device and passing the text to the synthesizer.
speakupbridge has the following features:
* The ability to communicate with any device that can accept a string
of text using a /dev interface.
* The ability to define the commands used by the synthesizer in a
user-editable configuration file.
* Multiple synthesizer definitions in a single configuration file.
* Change the pronunciation of words using a dictionary file (a feature 
speakup
really should do itself).
* Save and reload speakup settings for each defined synthesizer.
For more information or to download the program please visit: 
http://www.shawnk.ca/speakup
I haven't had a lot of time to work on or test this code lately so there's 
likely to be some rough spots. You'll have to compile the code but that 
should be easy enough. I've tested this with my serial Artic transport 
synthesizer and it seems to work. I don't use speakup regularly thoe (too 
many other missing/bbroken features) so this program really hasn't had any 
hard testing.
This solution isn't perfect, you still won't get kernel messages from boot 
up but it least it should be possible to use a hardware synthesizer once the 
system is started and that's probably better than nothing at all.