[sword-devel] Greetings/ Text-to-speech

[sword-devel@crosswire.org]

> On Sat, 7 Sep 2002 porton@narod.ru wrote:
> 
> > A false belief (if you are about Sword library, not BibleCS). Individual
> > Sword's front-ends can just call some speech engine (such as Festival)
> > themselves directly, not through Sword.
> 
> Actually, we would tend to do just this (integrating with Sword, not
> frontends) whenever possible.  If we wanted TTS, we should try to build it 
> into Sword at the library level to provide the functionality to ALL 
> frontends.  This helps keep the frontends on an equal level as much as 
> possible, which allows us to provide similar feature sets to users on 
> different platforms.  If all our TTS options were platform dependant, that 
> would be about the only good reason to avoid integration with the library 
> and go straight to the frontend.

Are you a communist? :-) Why you want to limit front-ends by using not all 
possibilities of a speech engine directly, but through unification of Sword 
mid-layer to keep these on equal level?

It would make sense only if we would need interfacing to different speech 
engines from a single program...

Well yes, it is desirable but namely from a _single_ program (let's call it 
swordvoice), which would be a command line utility to play sound from Sword 
modules.

To other programs it would be just like integrating in Sword a GUI library to 
cross interface Win32, X11 etc.

We don't need this as e.g. WxWindows (which is a platform independent GUI 
library) already exists.
-- 
Victor Porton (porton@ex-code.com)