[Sugar-devel] Assistance needed to debug Sugar Activities book examples for TTS

[Jim Simmons]

Aleksey,

I'm writing a beginner's book on creating Sugar Activities over at
Floss Manuals.  The URL is:

http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/ActivitiesGuideSugar/WebHome

I'm doing a chapter on adding Text To Speech to your Activity.  I'm
using simplified versions of Read Etexts as sample code for the
chapters because I want something more interesting than the "Hello
World" examples that beginners generally get, but not too complicated.

When I originally wrote TTS into Read Etexts using speech-dispatcher I
mostly understood how it worked.  When you updated it to use either
gst-espeak-plugin or speech-dispatcher most of my code didn't change
much so I didn't spend much time figuring out what you did.  Now I
need to create a simpler version of the same code to show to others.
My attempt to do that is in Gitorious here:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/myo-sugar-activities-examples

The code in question is in two files: ReadEtextsTTS.py and speech.py.
The first one is a standalone Python version of Read Etexts with no
toolbar.  You start and stop speech using the "End" key on the keypad.
 The second one is adapted from the code you wrote for Read Etexts,
with the speech-dispatcher stuff removed.  I've looked at the code a
lot and it seems to me that it should be as close to the original as I
can make it.  However, pause and resume don't work.  When I start
speech it does the speaking and highlighting just fine, but when I
press the "End" key to pause it stops speaking, but the next press of
the "End" key makes it resume from the start of the page again,
instead of resuming from where it left off.  I can't see why it's
doing that so I'm hoping to get more eyeballs checking it, especially
yours.

I tried the examples on your page on gst-espeak-plugin:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/gst-plugins-espeak

I like them a lot and would like to include them, or versions of them,
in the book, giving you full credit of course.  I would only do that
with your permission.  They would not be a substitute for my own
examples since they don't demonstrate pausing and resuming, but they
do demonstrate things I didn't know espeak could do.

When I have this chapter finished I'd like your feedback as well.

Thanks,

James Simmons