[Tfug] Text-to-speach conversion - straight from plain text to an audio file?

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Jim,

> I have a book currently in a big .PDF file.  I have a
> friend who, due to severe dyslexia, can't read anything that long. 
> But he listens to audiobooks and often "reads" big text-heavy 
> websites via software speech synth.
> 
> Is there an app under Linux, or even a website somewhere,
> that can "read" a big chunk of text in at once and output an 
> .MP3 or .OGG or whatever audio file?  That would allow him to
> "read" it even when away from his computer.

Of course, Adobe's "Reader" (formerly acrobat reader) does
this inherently.  I'm sure you can find a Linux version
thereof?

Flite and Festival are also generic TTS engines and I'm sure
there are Linux ports of both of those.

But, you haven't said what *form* the "book" is stored in
the PDF.  E.g., you can put *scanned* images into a PDF
(this is how *I* save books as it preserves the graphics,
etc) which poses a bigger problem as you would then need
to OCR the images before you would even have text
available to convert to speech.

Also consider that a single "audio file" is *much* less
convenient to read than a structured document.  With the
text available, you can move through the document in
units of characters, words, sentences, paragraphs,
pages, chapters, etc.  This is especially helpful as
there are many words that most speech synthesizers
either mispronounce (based on context or poor
pronouncing dictionaries) or won't pronounce at *all*
(e.g., acronyms that aren't uppercase are often
treated as regular words and badly pronounced -- "cpu",
"crt", "tty", etc.).  Being able to access the underlying
text is a real win as you can then *spell* the word and
figure out what it really is...

I.e., ship him the PDF and let him read it under adobe's
Reader instead of doing him the "favor" of converting
it to audio...  I'd have to check if the PDA versions
of reader have the same accessibility features as the
desktop variants.

You should also google "Kurzweil Reader" or "Kurzweil
Reading Machine" and then, possibly, hunt on eBay for 
one (I have one but won't part with it).  This would
probably make his life *much* easier!  :>

Good luck!
--don