Emacspeak discussion list

[Victor Tsaran <vtsaran AT gmail.com>]

> As always, Tim’s background information is very insightful! Thank you, Tim!


> Arkadiusz, SwiftMac server does support tones, however, I do not believe 
> they have been applied to the indentation routines. To be super-honest with 
> you, I did not know that an option of using was ever available even with 
> Dectalk speech. I know that you can turn off indentation announcements, but 
> I do not think you can change the announcements themselves without 
> modifying the code.
Since you are new to Emacs and Emacspeak, I would suggest to take some time 
to get used to how the product currently works before embarking on with 
requesting the changes.
Not sure if you had a chance to go through Emacspeak docs and Raman’s blog to 
get an idea of what is covered and how this software works. It’s quite 
different from what you are used to.

Anyway, good luck!
Victor





> On Jul 8, 2025, at 3:05 PM, Tim Cross (via emacspeak Mailing List) 
> <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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 background 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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