Emacspeak discussion list

[Tim Cross <theophilusx AT gmail.com>]

I'll start by saying that unfortunately, I don't have a definitive
answer to your question. This is primarily because you are using the
switfMac server and I'm not familiar with that server. However, I can
provide some baqckground which may be useful.

Back in the early days of emacspeak, the primary speech synthesizer used
was the Dectalk Express, a dedicated hardware text-to-speech
synthesizer. As a result, some of the fundamental design decisions
underlying the emacspeak architecture can be traced back to this
hardware. For example, the Dectalk Express used in-line codes to alter
things like pitcvh, volume, speaking rate, puncvtuation level
etc. (possibly worth noting that in the last couple of years, the
successor to the hardware dectalk, a software only version, was 'raised
fromt he dead' and can again be built on Linux and possibly other
platforms and can still be used with Emacspeak).

One of the features of the Dectalk was the ability to play tones. In the
original dectalk server for emacspeak, you could choose between
indentation being identified by a tone or by it being spoken as number
of indents or spaces. I don't recall if the tone version used different
tones to indicate indentation depth, but that seems logical.

When we started to migrate away from hardware tts devices to software
solutions, Raman used a program, I think it was called tone, to generate
tones so that the tone based indentation was available. Later, I think
he used built in support within Tcl to generate the tones.

So, the good news is that the ability to play tones and use tones to
indicate indentation is part of the speech server API, at least it is
when using speech servbers that use the 'standard' Tcl based
interface/libraries like the dtk-exp, dtk-soft, outloud and espeak
servers. The possibly bad news is that I don't know if the swift based
mac server supports tones, so you may need to hack that a bit to get
something working. However, you should be able to examine the dtk-exp
(or other servers) and the tts-lib.tcl library, together with emacspeak
*.el files to see how emacspeak communicates indentation information to
speech servers and get ideas on hows to implement tones inside/with the
swift based server.

Note that this is assuming the swift server doesn't already havwe this
support either partially or fully implemented. As I said, I know nothing
about the swift server and no longer run macOS.

HTH

"Arkadiusz" (via emacspeak Mailing List) <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> writes:

> Hi,
> So I am really serious about using Emacs to its maximum. Today I have used 
> it to write
> some actual code that has actually been committed to my work repo! One 
> thing that makes me
> very! unproductive is the way Emacspeak presents indentation. It says 
> something like
> indent 1 let name equals Arkadiusz
> This is very bad for a couple of reasons
> 1. I am more interested in the depth of the indent, so 1 indent, 2 indent, 
> X-indent would
> be more appropriate than indent 1, indent 2, indent X.
> 2. I would like the program to beep up on encountering an indent, the 
> higher the sound,
> the deeper the indent. Because I have an absolute pitch hearing I can use 
> such a tool to
> skim through very fast.
>
> Is it configurable somewhat or I need to make my own plugin? Also below I 
> would like to
> ask some random questions, which are just asked out of curiosity.
>
> 1. In my company we have a line length limit. Yeah, I can use a linter (and 
> I probably
> should, and sometimes I even do), but wouldn't it be cool to have a sound 
> and/or speech
> announcements when we're getting close to the margin?
> 2. Can I fold my code to a treeview-like structure based on indent level? 
> When editing C/C
> ++, C# or Swift I would like to focus on one part of the code while having 
> everything else
> neatly folded.
> 3. A propos making a plugin: if I want to extend the functionality of 
> Emacspeak, is there
> any contributions guide? If I manage to make something useful, I'd like to 
> give back to
> the community!
>
> I would like to tell you that I wasn't excited about using a computer for 
> so long. You
> make me refeel a feeling which I last had 15 years ago when I started using 
> the computer.
> Thank you everyone for your support,
> Nuno
>
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