Hi Eric,
Many thanks for your continuing interest.
On May 9, 2006, at 4:09 AM, Eric Zoerner wrote:
I am considering getting my feet wet in gnuspeech development by
working on a port of PrEditor to Mac OS X, and perhaps adding
support for multiple phoneme/posture sets for different languages.
Also to make gnuspeech more language neutral, I would like to add
support for X-SAMPA in addition to keeping the IPA support. Going
forward I think the Webster and Trillium notations will only be
relevant for English.
These days it has become so easy to use IPA, I suspect, that IPA
only could even be the route to go. I find Webster's is quite
awkward, sometimes misleading, and relatively unnecessary. Is
there a Webster's dictionary of Irish ;-) The big advantage of the
Trillium script is that it can be generated using a standard
keyboard with no special software, and edited using emacs. That's
the reason it was developed and used. If you have two forms of
phonetic script for Irish, I'd rather see IPA and an extended
Trillium script than IPA and Websters
Am I right to assume that no one else is currently working on
PrEditor?
You are right, no-one is working on PrEditor (at least officially
as part of the GNUSpeech project -- who knows what might be
happening in the backwoods of Thailand or the deserts of China ;-).
PrEditor is a nice project to work on. Michael Forbes did a
rewrite of PrEditor during the latter stages of Trillium and it was
originally written by David Marwood (who was in Vancouver last time
we were in contact, but I've lost touch wit him) and Vince DeMarco
(who is now with Apple, AFAIK). Michael is on the members list for
the gnuspeech project, so you could contact him if you want. He
was in the last stages of a Physics PhD last I heard from him. I
would have guessed he's finished by now, but his email address
should still work. Vince contributes to the main Apple Cocoa
developer list (address@hidden) from time to time. I
should have made a note of his address when I saw it, but it is a
standard Apple email address (<whatever>@apple.com), or you could
post to the list and see if he notices. None of them has been
involved in GNUSpeech any time recently.
You will probably want me to add you to the members list at some
point, in which case you have to get a GNU user ID and let me know
what it is so I can add you. You'll notice that the release date
on the current (NeXT) version of PrEditor is August 18 1995 which
is, I think, the latest release date of any component of the
original system, except, perhaps, the dictionary.
All good wishes.
david