ibmtts output module and utf8

[Hynek Hanke]

On Sun, 2007-29-07 at 10:44 +0200, Lukas Loehrer wrote:
> Unfortunatley, this completely killed index mark reporting in the
> ibmtts modul. Maybe, we could make the SSML stripping a configuration
> option.

Hi Lukas,

I've made it a configuration option in CVS and with SSML off by default.

> The only comprehensive documentation for ibmtts I know of is:
> http://www.wizzardsoftware.com/docs/tts.pdf
> However, this file does not mention SSML support at all. One concrete problem 
> is that it is unclear how
> SSML index marks, which are strings, are translated into ibmtts index
> marks, which are integers, or even if SSML index marks are supported
> at all. 

I'll contact Janina Sajka from Capital Accessibility in case
she could help us.

> > Lukas, please, where can I get this eci.ini? The .deb package I have
> > for testing doesn't contain this file.
> The eci.ini file contains information about the installed languages,
> input filters and other things I do not understand. It should be
> generated in the postinstall script in
> /var/opt/IBM/ibmtts/cfg/eci.ini.

Thank you. I have this file, but there is nothing SSML related.
So I guess this will be the difference why SSML works for some
people and doesn't for another ones. After I put the configuration
options you suggest to my eci.ini file, SSML started to work.

> The weird thing with the above is that the SSML filter seems to get
> activated as as soon as an input string to eciAddText() starts with
> <speak>, even though autoloading of the SSML filter is disabled by the
> above settings. Also, as soon as the SSML filter is activated, the
> expected input encoding apparently chages from cp1252 to utf-8.

The change in encoding makes it even more confusing. Don't you please
know if it is possible to ask IBM TTS to accept utf-8 even without the
SSML filter? Otherwise we will have to add configurable voice-specific
recoding from utf-8 to other charsets :(

Hynek