Speakup works with Czech language

[Hynek Hanke]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 08:42:04AM -0500, Kirk Reiser wrote:
>> 1) speakup.c must be patched on one place. The spk_chartab
>> table is specific to iso-8859-1 and it doesn't work with
>> other codings (~l. 206, speakup.c), because in the extended character
>> sets, some symbols over 128 are also ALPHA or A_CAP, not just
>> B_SYM. If this is not changed, Speakup writes strange codes
>> of these keys into /dev/softsynth (not the codes defined
>> in iso-8859-2 for Czech, for example).
>> Since it's not desirable to change Speakup's code for every
>> internationalization and change it every time we want to use a
>> different language, I'd like to ask if it wouldn't be possible to make
>> this table accessible from /proc/speakup? So that users are able to
>> change it like they are able to change /proc/speakup/characters.

> I agree we need to figure out a way to convert the non-iso 1859-1
> characters to get appropriate representations for various languages.

We were discussing this here in Brailcom and we came to the
conclusion that it would be the best solution to implement UTF-8
support into Speakup.

There are two main reasons for this:

1) It solves the internationalization issue once forever. This way,
people in all countries (except maybe for the ones who read right
to left) will be able to use Speakup without any additional changes
in the code. It solves the interaction with Speechd-Up since there
will be no need to use different encodings.

2) The trend in text consoles in nations that don't use iso-8859-1
currently is to switch to Unicode. For example RedHat, by default,
installs everything in UTF-8 since 9.0. If I understand it correctly,
it isn't possible to run Speakup with UTF-8 now.

It would be great if you could tell me what is needed for supporting
UTF-8 in Speakup and what are the possible problems. You don't have
to explain the basics of unicode, I'm using it quite extensively in Speech
Dispatcher. But I'm not sure about the routines available in the
kernel and so on. I don't know what the change would mean for the
Speakup's code. Once we sort this out, I will be happy to help
you with a part of this as I think it's very important.

> The tables however which the kernel uses to represent those character
> sets are not part of speakup so I don't think we should make them
> available through the /proc/speakup interface.  

I was refering to speakup.c line 206 (the spk_chartab) array. This
clearly is a part of Speakup and it doesn't work with other character
sets than iso-8859-1. However, when we use unicode, this problem
disappers.

Since this is currently one of the most important things,
I propose to leave the other things for now. I'll return
to the question about punctuation processing later.

Regards,
Hynek