Re: Emacspeak and UTF-8 -- possible?

[Tim X]

"Robert D. Crawford" <rdc1x@comcast.net> writes:

> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>>> 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.
>>
>> That's not a good reason to prevent display of any other char.
>
> Does any other char mean UTF-8?  If this is the case, wouldn't you agree
> that it is better to not have UTF-8 support than to not be able to use
> the computer because your speech synth locks up unexpectedly and often?
>

The problem is a lack of familiarity with how emacspeak achieves what 
it does so simply. As you would know, making emacspeak support other 
encodings would involve a complete re-write of its internals - in fact,
a whole new translation layer would be required in order to enable full
support of emacs' supported character encodings *and* support both 
TTS engines that do and do not support encodings other than ASCII. 
I suspect that in order to keep it as flexible as it is now with 
respect to how little is required to support various add on
packages, a totally new architecture would be required. This is
also likely to introduce additional processing overhead which could
easily degrade the real time responsiveness to the point where the
system is not usable, particularly when using some of the free TTS
engines, which already are only just acceptable with respect to 
responsiveness. 

Stefan makes some valuable contributions, especially to this group, but
in this instance, his opinion is not based on anything of substance 
and contributes nothing of relevance. 

Tim