Help configuring speechd-up and Espeak for non-English setups

[Alexander E . Patrakov]

Hello,

I am a maintainer of LFS LiveCD and I am trying (because of user
requests) to add a working support of speakup to this CD. The latest
CD with speakup, espeak, speech-dispatcher and speechd-up can be
downloaded from this location:

http://kerrek.linuxfromscratch.org/pub/lfs-livecd/lfslivecd-x86-6.3-r2145-min.iso
 (231 MB)

Currently, this works as follows: the user types "linux
speakup.synth=soft" at the boot prompt, the bootscripts notice this,
and start speech-dispatcher and speechd-up. Then the CD shows (and
speaks!) timezone and language configuration dialogs. After that, the
console font is set properly for the configured language, the language
code is written to the /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf file, and
speech-dispatcher and speechd-up are restarted so that the language
and encoding settings get applied.

My question is really about the proper speechd-up arguments.
Currently, based on the texinfo documentation that comes with
speechd-up, only the "-c $CHARMAP" switches are passed to this
program, as this is crucial for proper internationalization.

However, I got a bug report: with these settings, the CD doesn't say
characters such as "[" even when told to examine the current
character. The easiest way to reproduce this on my CD is to boot it
with the "linux speakup.synth=soft LANG=en_US TZ=UTC" parameters, wait
while it pronounces its welcome message, press Enter, and then press
the "1" key on numpad several times (in speakup, this examines the
previous character).

The prompt to be examined looks like this:

root [ ~ ] #

The CD does say "space" for space characters, announces letters, but
says nothing about punctuation, thus leaving a blind person no idea
what these characters are. The problem is that speechd-up initializes
the /proc/speakup/characters array for the "[" character with "["
itself (instead of "left bracket" or its translation to another
language), and Espeak doesn't pronounce this character unless it is
configured to pronounce all punctuation.

The fix suggested by the reporter was to add the --dont-init-tables
switch to the speechd-up command line. However, texinfo documentation
that comes with speechd-up says that it is incompatible with
internationalization. So, I am asking here for a better fix (maybe in
the form of a patch that, e.g., treats one-letter messages specially
and forcing "all" punctuation mode for them, if this happens to work).

Yes, I have read the FAQ:

Q: Punctuation and capital letters recognition doesn't properly work

A: This is an issue again related to Speakups design. It is currently
being worked on.

What is the current status of this? Should I wait for a fix or simply
add the --dont-init-tables and lose (non-existing?) support for
non-English languages?

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov