ReadMe


The eSpeak homepage is:  http://espeak.sourceforge.net


Compiling
=========

The  src  directory contains a makefile that produces:

1.  "libspeak.so.1.xx".  (where xx is a version number)
    This is a shared library which contains the text to speech engine.
    Its API is described in the file "speak_bin.h".

2.  "espeak" binary.  This is a small command-line program which is a front
    end to the libespeak library, which it needs.

3.  "speak"  binary.  This is a command-line program which contains the
    text to speech engine. It does not use the libespeak library.


When run, the "speak" and "espeak" programs expect to find the  espeak-data
directory either in the user's home directory, or if not there, in /use/share.


Portaudio.
========== 

The "speak" program uses the PortAudio sound interface library.  There are two
versions, V18 and V19 and their APIs are different.  Some Linux distributions
use V18 (eg. Debian, Ubuntu) others (eg. SuSe) use V19.

To compile to use a particular version of the PortAudio library, first copy
either  portaudio18.h  or  portaudio19.h  to  portaudio.h.

If you don't need eSpeak to output sound, but only to produce WAV files,
then you can remove or comment out the following line in  speech.h.
This will mean that eSpeak doesn't use any PortAudio functions.
 #define  USE_PORTAUDIO


Compiling Data
==============

You can modifiy spelling-to-phoneme rules and exceptions and re-compile this
data with the  speak  program (see  docs/dictionary.html). In summary, edit
the dictsource/**_rules and dictsource/**_list files and compile using:
   espeak --compile=**
where ** is the language code (eg. en for English).

In order to modify the sounds or other characteristics of phonemes, or
to add additional phonemes, another program "espeakedit" is needed. This
is provided in a separate package.


PowerPC and Big-Endian Processors
=================================

The compiled data in the espeak-data directory is not binary compatible between
processors with different byte ordering.  For a PowerPC or other big-endian
processor use must use data which has been compiled (using espeakedit) on
a big-endian processor.