Re: tclx drivers for emacspeak

["T. V. Raman" <raman@Adobe.COM>]

JR> No, there is no archive of drivers because, there has been no motivation
JR>thus far to develop drivers for anything but the serial DecTalks and the
JR>software DecTalk that runs on the DECAlphas.

The emacspeak mailing list is being archived thanks to the list owner Greg
Priest-Dorman.
If people post work in progress drivers there that would provide a good point
to share common work.


JR>When developing drivers, keep in mind that these synthesizers are interfaced
JR>through the serial port (I'm not really sure how the software DECTalk
JR>works), because there are no linux/unix drivers for internal synthesizers.
JR>So, if people are to develop drivers for internal synthesizers they must
JR>also develop a low-level driver for the card, and this will more than
JR>likely have to be at the kernel level.  There is one guy who is developing
JR>such a low-level driver for the internal DECTalk, but as he is working on
JR>it in his spare time, he makes no promises as to its release date.


Let me clarify some of the issues raised by Jim above:

The dectalk Express and many other serial speech synthesizers will require no
more than the tcl script analogous to dtk-exp for emacspeak to work.

Other speech cards that do not communicate to the PC over a serial port but
instead talk over the internal bus, e.g. the Dectalk PC, require a 
device  driver that makes the card appear as a serial device to linux.
This peice of work would have to be done for making the card usable by *any*
linux program that wishes to talk.
This is the spare time work mentioned above.

As for the software Dectalk on the alpha, it ships as a callable C library and
while at DEC I wrote an enhanced version of TCL that talked directly to this
library.
So using this modified TCL I could then write a simple tcl script dtk-soft
--the software Dectalk analog of dtk-exp to enable emacspeak interface
seamlessly with the software Dectalk.

So in summary:

there are two pieces to supporting a generic speech device on linux with
emacspeak

1) First make the device visible to linux; if it is a serial card, you need to
do nothing --since you can just talk to /dev/ttyS0 or wherever the device is
connected

2) Once the device is visible implement a program (to date this has been done
as tcl scripts) that watches its standard input for a given set of commands,
and sends the appropriate information to the speech device on receiving these
commands.

tclx proved an expedient way of writing the above; there is nothing to prevent
someone writing similar programs in C, C++, perl, java or whatever your
favorite language of the week happens to be.

--Raman

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

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