ReadMe
1
2The eSpeak homepage is: http://espeak.sourceforge.net
3
4
5Compiling
6=========
7
8The src directory contains a makefile that produces:
9
101. "libspeak.so.1.xx". (where xx is a version number)
11 This is a shared library which contains the text to speech engine.
12 Its API is described in the file "speak_bin.h".
13
142. "espeak" binary. This is a small command-line program which is a front
15 end to the libespeak library, which it needs.
16
173. "speak" binary. This is a command-line program which contains the
18 text to speech engine. It does not use the libespeak library.
19
20
21When run, the "speak" and "espeak" programs expect to find the espeak-data
22directory either in the user's home directory, or if not there, in /use/share.
23
24
25Portaudio.
26==========
27
28The "speak" program uses the PortAudio sound interface library. There are two
29versions, V18 and V19 and their APIs are different. Some Linux distributions
30use V18 (eg. Debian, Ubuntu) others (eg. SuSe) use V19.
31
32To compile to use a particular version of the PortAudio library, first copy
33either portaudio18.h or portaudio19.h to portaudio.h.
34
35If you don't need eSpeak to output sound, but only to produce WAV files,
36then you can remove or comment out the following line in speech.h.
37This will mean that eSpeak doesn't use any PortAudio functions.
38 #define USE_PORTAUDIO
39
40
41Compiling Data
42==============
43
44You can modifiy spelling-to-phoneme rules and exceptions and re-compile this
45data with the speak program (see docs/dictionary.html). In summary, edit
46the dictsource/**_rules and dictsource/**_list files and compile using:
47 espeak --compile=**
48where ** is the language code (eg. en for English).
49
50In order to modify the sounds or other characteristics of phonemes, or
51to add additional phonemes, another program "espeakedit" is needed. This
52is provided in a separate package.
53
54
55PowerPC and Big-Endian Processors
56=================================
57
58The compiled data in the espeak-data directory is not binary compatible between
59processors with different byte ordering. For a PowerPC or other big-endian
60processor use must use data which has been compiled (using espeakedit) on
61a big-endian processor.
62
63
64