Re: Emacspeak and UTF-8 -- possible?

[Tim X]

"cmr.Pent@gmail.com" <cmr.Pent@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm having the following problem: when I run emacspeak, I cannot input
> or load cyrillic characters. My emacs version is 21.4, my language
> environment is UTF-8, and in plain emacs cyrillics work just fine.
> When I invoke emacs using "emacspeak" command, all non-latin
> characters turn into umlauts.
>
> The funny thing is that even on gnu.org site (I use w3m) some unicode
> symbols (like quotation marks) turn into umlauts. I have a suspicion
> that the problem is in emacspeaks' inability to work with multibyte
> characters but I'm not sure because of my poor understanding of emacs'
> character coding internals.
>
> I'm really only a occasional user of emacspeak, but nevertheless I'd
> be glad to know if there is a way to overcome the problem. For now it
> would be Ok if cyrillics are displayed properly even if they are not
> read aloud at all or are mistakenly read as umlauts.
>

Emacspeak AFAIK doesn't support multi-byte characters. The problem is that many
speech synthesises, particularly older hardware based ones like the dectalk,
don't understand UTF-8 character sets. If you send them a multibyte character,
they either lock up, speak garbage or do something else unexpected. 

Therre have been some branches that have forked off the original emacspeak
code, but I'm not sure what their status is or where you could find out more
(google?). There is also an emacspeak mailing list. 

One thing you could try, assuming your TTS synth handles multibyte characters
is to ensure the variable emacspeak-unibyte is not set to t

e.g. 

,----[ C-h v emacspeak-unibyte RET ]
| emacspeak-unibyte is a variable defined in `emacspeak-setup.el'.
| Its value is t
| 
| 
| Documentation:
| Set this to nil before starting  emacspeak
| if you are running in a multibyte enabled environment.
| 
| [back]
`----

This may or may not help, just a guess really.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au