SayMore Version 0.42 © 1997 By Kenton A. Groombridge Quick note: I have ordered ClassAct about a month and a half ago. I still have not received it, but when I do, I will start working on some major changes to the program. Until then, it will be just simple bug fixes and enhancements. I like ClassAct, because unlike MUI, it costs you, the user, nothing. The use of this program requires: Workbench 2.04+ narrator.device V37+ found on Workbench 2.04 and 2.05. ******************** AND *********************** translator.library V43+ found on Aminet as: util/libs/translator42.lha util/libs/Tran43pch.lha ************************************************ Introduction: SayMore is a program designed to replace Say. Say was fine for Workbench 1.3, but the Say program included with 2.0X did not have the ability to change most of the options in the new narrator.device. This is a prerelease version of SayMore. It is not far from being completed, but I want to make this program the best I can. Please look over the interface and features and tell me what you like and dislike. ************************************************ The following use to be true, but now I can say that SayMore, even in it's beta stage, is superior to all programs like it on Aminet. There are a couple programs similar to SayMore currently on Aminet. These programs have severe memory leaks and are not system friendly. A considerable amount of time and effort has gone into SayMore to ensure that it is safe. It is near impossible for me to test all the limits of SayMore, but all test have proven that it is completely 100% OS friendly and has no memory leaks. ************************************************ Disclaimer: The use of this program is on your own risk. There is no liability or responsibility for any damage caused by the program. Copyright: SayMore is free to be spread on public-domain and shareware disks, as long as they  are sold for a reasonable charge. Use of the program: SayMore is my gift to the Amiga community. I do not charge money for the use of SayMore, but I have coined the term caveatware. Caveatware means that you may use the program just by reading the following. You don't have to abide by them, just read them. 1. If English is your native language, please try to speak it correctly. I know that my English is not always correct, but I am trying to improve it. Some of by pet peeves are using the word "gender" when you mean "sex." As one person said, gender is the attribute of a word and not a person. This all has to do with political correctness which I despise. 2. Write a program for the Amiga. It seems like every time I read usenet news, there is somebody wishing there was a program that did this or that. Do something about it, and write a program. I use to write programs with the public domain/freeware a68k and blink. Although painful, I did write some pretty nifty programs. 3. If you write Amiga software, and charge a fee for what you write, please consider discounts for other Amiga software authors. 4. Send a message to me letting me know that you use the program. I would greatly appreciate some input on what you would like to see added or changed to the program. 5. If you do find a bug with the program. Please let me know as soon as possible. This will make future versions of the program better for you and other users. 5. Bug Amiga International to include narrator.device and translator.library with future releases of Workbench. 6. Please forgive the sloppiness in this documentation as I am in a hurry to get this out. 7. More to follow. Required: As far as I know, this program requires Workbench 2.04+, but it has not been tested on all platforms. It was written on an Amiga 2000/GVP 040/Workbench 3.1 and an Amiga 4000/040/Workbench 3.1. Remember that it requires the new narrator.device included with Workbench 2.0X, and V43 of translator.library found on Aminet. Reporting errors: I have put in some code to help determine the cause of errors. When a detectable error occurs in this program, a requester will pop up with some text indicating the error that occurred and the approximate amount of CHIP RAM and FAST RAM. If either of these numbers are small, you may be running out of memory. Try to free some memory and try again. Read the message. If the message says "Can not open translator.library V43 or above," check to see that you have that library and it is the correct version. The only problem that will not display an error, is if intuition.library V37 or above could not be opened. This is because the requester requires intuition.library to be opened to operate. If you can not determine the cause of the error or the program fails without a detectable error, please send me the configuration of your system, other programs that were running at the time, and any other information you feel is important. Contacting the author: e-mail kgroombr@interquest.de Kenton.Groombridge@wpc.af.mil snail-mail Kenton Groombridge PSC 3 Box 1766 APO AE 09021 USA -OR- Kenton Groombridge PSC 3 Box 1766 D:67661 Kapaun Flugplatz Germany Acknowledgments: The first SayMore program was written using HiSoft DevPac Assembler 3.04. I have sent several messages to HiSoft as how to upgrade to the most recent version of the program, but have never received a response. If you know who to contact about upgrading this program, please let me know. This version of the program is written using SAS/C 6.58. SAS/C is a great program, and I hope that they continue support for the Amiga. Thanks to the SAS/C Amiga developers for the four patches written after Commodore's death. Thanks to Gateway 2000 for saving the Amiga's future. To do: 1. Refine the tool types. 2. File requester to speak files. 3. Command line operation that parses the command line. 4. Switch characters so that the voice can change while speaking. 5. Rewind, Fast Forward, Stop, and Pause buttons. 6. Sizeable main window. 7. Menu with items such as "Open", "About", "Quit, etc." 8. Font sensitivity. 9. Localization. 10. More face types. 11. Refine the GUI. 12. Save options, with the ability to save multiple setups. 13. Enhance the breakup of files. Maybe do a plugin or something so users can make their own routines to break down the sentences to fit his/her needs. 14. Multiple selection of icons. 15. Progress indicator. 16. Pretty icons. 17. Better documentation in AmigaGuide format. 18. Any feasible user request. 0.10B Written in assembler. It was not user friendly, but it worked. 0.20 Ported to C and made several enhancements. 0.25 Fixed a bug in error reporting. It reported that it could not create the console message port when it could not open translator.library and vice-versa. Included the correct documentation. 0.30 Fixed bug with the console_task that caused messages to get passed to the wrong instance of the program when two or more instances of the program were loaded. Changed translate_buffer's size to account for the largest possible translate string (I hope). Discovered a bug in translator.library. When it handles large strings of consecutive numbers, it will skip numbers every 100 numbers it processes. The tranlate_buffer's size accounts for the largest string possible when or if this bug is ever fixed. Found a bug with the creation of the console_task. If console_task tried to find it's parents message port before the port was added to the system list, it would crash with a Guru 80000008. I could not find a way to completely fix this bug. I did make it where the parent's message port is added to the system list way before the spawned task should ask for it. The only way I know to fix this is to have only one instance of SayMore running at a time. If at anytime you get this error, please let me know, and I will work harder to try to eliminate this bug. Added "Face" window. It is ugly, but it is a start. 0.33 Changed code so that only one instance of SayMore can run at a time. There really is no reason for two instances since only one narrator.device can be open at any one time. Fixed "Face" window so that it works with different size borders. Eliminated the GimmeZeroZero window for face so less system resources are needed. Sped up Face routine significantly. Now uses EasyRequest() to print error messages. This is good news for those who are using monitors that don't sync down to 15KHz. "Face" window now uses a diamond mouth. Don't worry, future version will have user configurable mouths. This is just for testing since I am certian that the round mouth is functional. 0.41 Fixed bug with the code that determined if another instance of saymore was running. It used to assign a name to the node of the process. The problem was, if the program was run from the shell, it would change the process node of the shell to "SayMore". If the program was exited and an attempt was made to run it again, it would not run because the shell still had the name "SayMore". It would only run again if the shell was exited. Make sense? Now it uses a message port to send and recieve it's messages when starting up. Added one of my "To Do" items about a requester for "CONTINUE" or "BRING TO FRONT". It can't bring the "SayMore Input" and "SayMore Output" windows to front because they are actually CON:. Depending on the difficulty and the time I have, I will try to change CON: to windows and attach the console.device. The current method is easiest since CON: already has cut/paste and history built in. Fixed the spelling of my name in the title bar. When I was doing a search and replace, I killed the two o's in Groombridge. Oh well, it didn't affect the running and it actually saved a couple bytes. Added a couple optimizations that save a few bytes and sped up the code a bit. SayMore is now translator.library V43+ only. I did this because it is free, and it overcomes the shortcommings and the bugs found in V37 translator.library. It also has many features which make it a must have. The docs say that V42 has bugs, but I never came across them. Since the V43 patch is free, I made SayMore V43 only. Command line operation. Although not complete, you can specify a file name to speak. The length of the filename does have a limit, but future versions will overcome this. At the moment, this is under testing. To read a file back type: Saymore "path:file", where "path:file" is the absolute or relative path and file name. Added tool types. At the moment there is no way to save the current configuration, but this is due to change. To change their values, use the Icon->Information from the Workbench menus and add/delete/edit the tools. Tool types currently supported are: 0.42 Fixed some stupid bugs in the file read routines. Although the windows would open, no text was rendered in them. Also the windows sometimes would not close when the program was finished speaking the file. Fixed the "EYE" types so that they are all the same width and height no matter what eye type is used. The "BOX" eye used to be rendered slightly larger. Changed the tooltype values for "EYES" and "MOUTH". "SQUARE" is now "BOX", and "ROUND" is now "OVAL". I did this for three reasons. It saves several bytes in the code, it makes the program faster, and they are more accurate terms. String Value ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOFACE Boolean: use if you do not want the face window. FACEX= Any positive value within the screen limits. FACEY= Any positive value within the screen limits. FACEWIDTH= Any positive value greater than 50 and within the screen limits. FACEHEIGHT= Any positive value greater than 75 and within the screen limits. NOMAIN Boolean: use if you do not want the main window. MAINX= Any positive value within the screen limits. MAINY= Any positive value within the screen limits. NOINPUT Boolean: use if you do not want the input window. INPUTX= Any positive value within the screen limits. INPUTY= Any positive value within the screen limits. INPUTWIDTH= Any positive value within the screen limits. INPUTHEIGHT= Any positive value within the screen limits. NOOUTPUT Boolean: use if you do not want the output window. OUTPUTX= Any positive value within the screen limits. OUTPUTY= Any positive value within the screen limits. OUTPUTWIDTH= Any positive value within the screen limits. OUTPUTHEIGHT=Any positive value within the screen limits. EYES= DIAMOND, BOX, OVAL MOUTH= DIAMOND, BOX, OVAL ******************************************************** Be careful with these two. If the number is too small, you will be rendering in the window borders and you can go outside the rastport. This can crash the system. If you leave these out, it will default to a safe value. MOUTHWIDTH= Any postive value. The bigger the number the smaller the mouth. MOUTHHEIGHT= Any postive value. The bigger the number the smaller the mouth. ******************************************************** VOLUME= 0 - 64 RATE= 40 - 400 PITCH= 65 - 320 SAMPFREQ= 5000 - 28000 PRIORITY= -128 - 127 AVBIAS= -31 - 32 AFBIAS= -31 - 32 ENTHUSIASM= 0 - 255 PERTURB= 0 - 255 CENTRALIZE= 0 - 100 ARTICULATE= 0 - 400 F1ADJ= -100 - 100 F2ADJ= -100 - 100 F3ADJ= -100 - 100 A1ADJ= -31 - 32 A2ADJ= -31 - 32 A3ADJ= -31 - 32 SEX= MALE, FEMALE MODE= NATURAL, ROBOTIC, MANUAL SPEAKER= BOTH, LEFT, RIGHT CENTPHON= AA, AE, AH, AO, EH, ER, IH, IY, OW, UH, UW ACCENT= Any accent listed in LOCALE:accents/ Do not use the .accent extension. These are not yet supported. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- INPUTBUFFER= The size of the input buffer for file reading. OUTPUTBUFFER=The size of the output buffer for the text conversion. These will be supported when the Sizeable main window is finished. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- MAINWIDTH= Any positive value within the screen limits. MAINHEIGHT= Any positive value within the screen limits. You all may wonder what happens to versions that are not listed above. They do exist, but are versions that I test and debug. They are not released to the general public. If you want to receive beta programs, actually they are all beta, send me an email and I will send you these for testing. All I ask is that you test them thoroughly and send me notes letting me know the problems you find. For those that don't want these unreleased beta's, I have not received any reports of bugs in the beta's that I have released on Aminet. Just so you know that I try to release safe programs. Get the latest version on my web page at: http://www.interquest.de/~kgroombr/