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