From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (qmail 10656 invoked from network); 7 Jan 1997 00:51:10 -0000 Received: from smtp-relay-2.Adobe.COM (192.150.11.2) by mail2.redhat.com with SMTP; 7 Jan 1997 00:51:10 -0000 Received: by smtp-relay-2.Adobe.COM (8.7.5) with ESMTP id PAA15915; Mon, 6 Jan 1997 15:29:23 -0800 (PST) Received: by inner-relay-1.Adobe.COM (8.7.5) with ESMTP id PAA06715; Mon, 6 Jan 1997 15:28:07 -0800 (PST) Received: by mail-345.corp.Adobe.COM (8.7.5) with ESMTP id PAA05886; Mon, 6 Jan 1997 15:29:33 -0800 (PST) Received: by labrador (8.6.9) id PAA24451; Mon, 6 Jan 1997 15:27:13 -0800 Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 15:27:13 -0800 Message-Id: <199701062327.PAA24451@labrador> To: blinux-list@redhat.com CC: raman@Adobe.COM Subject: Re: tclx drivers for emacspeak In-Reply-To: <199612121344.FAA22728@netcom4.netcom.com> References: <32AF7722.2DAB@magic.mb.ca> <199612121344.FAA22728@netcom4.netcom.com> Reply-To: raman@Adobe.COM From: "T. V. Raman" X-Phone: 1 (408) 536-3945 X-Fax: 1(408) 537-4042 List-Id: 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 Adobe Systems Tel: 1 (408) 536 3945 (W14-129) Advanced Technology Group Fax: 1 (408) 537 4042 (W14 129) 345 Park Avenue Email: raman@adobe.com San Jose , CA 95110 -2704 Email: raman@cs.cornell.edu http://labrador.corp.adobe.com/~raman/raman.html (Adobe Internal) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/raman.html (Cornell) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and in no way should be taken as representative of my employer, Adobe Systems Inc. ____________________________________________________________