Emacspeak discussion list

[Robert Melton <lists AT robertmelton.com>]

Hey All!

Short Version: 

I rewrote and modernized Swiftmac in 2 and need some testers to make 
sure it is relatively stable before I make a PR for emacspeak. 

https://github.com/robertmeta/swiftmac

Important: the rate setting is now between 0.1 and 1.0 which maps to 
the percentages you would set in VoiceOver, so 0.7 is 70%. So you 
will need to use something like:

(dtk-set-rate 0.7 t)

in your initt.el


Long Version: 

This is a near complete rewrite to Swiftmac to do three major things:

1. Use modern non-deprecated libraries in MacOS so it will have some 
long term stability
2. Build an approach that would port to C# and Windows well, will write
more about this coming soon in another post. 
3. Create new primitives in the server so we can move more 
and more decisions out of the server into the lisp (thanks Parham!)

I am using it as my daily driver now without any issues.  

Fixes and improvements are widespread, voice support works properly, 
split caps, beep caps works for typing not reading, and tons of fixes and 
a new way of working, see Design.md if you are interested. 


Next Steps:

Once I get some testers and time on this I will do a PR to emacspeak. 

Not blocking the PR, but just something I want to is create a new 
siftmac-voices.el where we can use the features of the new server.
For example, pitch multipler (tts_set_pitch_multiplier) is how we 
change the pitch in Swiftmac 2 and that is now a value between 0.5
and 2.0 -- stuff like that.  I also have some dream features I really 
want like "slow number mode", when seeing a number with 4 or 
more digits, I would like to crank the rate down a little, etc.  You 
can see the project issues for stuff I am considering. 

Thanks so much! 

--
Robert "robertmeta" Melton
lists AT robertmelton.com <mailto:lists AT robertmelton.com>