1README for FLite Emacspeak server
2        v0.2.0; 03/03/02
3========================================================================
4This code allows Emacspeak, as well as yasr and potentially Brass, to
5interface with the Festival Lite speech synthesizer.  It is currently in
6the beta stage and not necessarily well polished (well, neither is its
7documentation, for that matter), but it is working for me, although I have
8done most of my testing with yasr.  See the file INSTALL for instructions
9on compiling eflite and getting it to work with screen readers.
10
11Eflite uses the audio library included with Festival Lite, so it
12theoretically inherits ALSA support, although I seem to remember having
13trouble getting the ALSA code to compile (it seems that the ALSA API
14differs depending on which version is being used).
15
16The source is divided into two parts: a generic parser (es.c and some
17helper files) and a file for interfacing with Festival Lite (fs.c).
18The interface used by fs.c is borrowed from Roger Butenuth's speech
19library used by BRASS (in fact, I used his ViaVoice module as a starting
20point to write fs.c).  However, fs.c can be built to link against
21es.c directly if STANDALONE is defined (this is done in the Makefile).
22There may be legal issues that would arise if fs.c were linked against
23libspeech.a from BRASS, since BRASS is GPLed whereas FLite is not,
24but I am not sure one way or the other.
25
26Eflite takes the following options:
27-D: Run as a daemon and exit; do not read from stdin
28-d: enable debugging message
29-fi <filename>: read input from <filename>
30-c <context>: Attach to eflite server for the given context  (create it
31              if it does not exist yet)
32-v: print version and exit
33
34The "-c" option can be useful when testing new versions of eflite. You
35do not want to lose speech with your "good" version while performing
36the test. You would start your test version like this:
37
38./eflite -c test
39
40If the test version crashes, your old working version will not be
41affected. You may also use this option to for example run emacspeak
42and yasr in different contexts.
43
44Send flames, bug reports, etc. to mgorse@alum.wpi.edu.  You can also
45catch me on #blinux on openprojects, as "vortex"
46
47-Michael P. Gorse-
48-mgorse@alum.wpi.edu
49