Emacspeak on OS X?

["Nolan J. Darilek" <nolan_d@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Did a few quick searches in the archives, but couldn't find anything
on this subject.

A week ago I bought a shiny new '12 G4 powerbook. The initial plan
involved booting between Debian and OS X, but I decided to try
sticking with OS X. Anyhow, I've just concluded a week-long adventure
involving dragging my PB around to various friends, connecting to
their LANs and grabbing lots and lots of random packages. I'd hoped to
slap Emacspeak on the thing and use it as both a glorified BSD box and
a platform for playing movies/music/working with multimedia, whatever.

I thought all emacsen were created equal, but apparently they
aren't. The PB doesn't have an onboard serial port, so I purchased a
USB serial adapter to use with my dectalk while I toy with writing an
Emacspeak speech server which works with OS X's pleasant-sounding
TTS. I think the settings on the port are fine. I can cat text to it;
everything seems to flow smoothly.

The problems begin when I fire up emacspeak. I get speech, though only
when I arrow over individual characters or type. It sounds as if the
dectalk is trying to talk, as it sounds like it sorta hiccups, but it
doesn't handle Fink's emacs as well as Linux-native ports.

I have no idea how to even begin debugging something like this. It
seems odd that I can actively read the display character-by-character,
though anything which passively reads doesn't work. Its almost as if
lots of crucial functions aren't being advised. Fink installs
everything in /sw, and I thought that perhaps something may be up with
load-path, but it seems sane.

I'm running on OS X 10.2.5, emacs 21.something-nox (I'm trying the x
binaries soon) and Emacspeak 18.0. Unfortunately OS X's "batteries
included" tcl package doesn't include /usr/bin/tcl, so as per
suggestions from #tcl on freenode I modified the dtk-exp server to run
tclsh but require Tclx. By making dtk-exp +x and setting DTK_TCL to
run dtk-exp directly I'm experiencing no problems running this same
server under Linux. Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't believe
running the server directly on OS X produced any output beyond the initial
welcome message, which was partially cut off.

Any ideas on what I could try? Maybe I'll hammer out a document about
this experience when I'm finished. I really like my PB so far, and if
I can iron out these problems, these machines may be the best
compromise for someone wanting the power of Unix with the features and
ease-of-use of a commercial OS.

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