Is there a Greek sapi5 voice? Can you tell more about it?
I see Alexandros RealSpeak Solo Direct Voice on the FS site, but don't know
if it's good enough in Greek if I try to learn Greek language for example.
Is there other possibility?
Negoslav
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eleni Vamvakari" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2010 5:01 PM
Subject: Re: [Blind-Computing] Difference between MS-DOS and Windows
TXTfiles / Weird Issues with Word Perfect
Hello Alasdair,
Thank you so much for that wonderful explanation. I actually just
found a text editor/word processor called VDE.
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,53873-page,1-c,wordprocessing/description.html
It's features and usage are incredible, and if it works with a
screen reader, then I'll definitely be using it from now on on my DOS
machine. It actually has options for saving and loading text in
various formats, including unformatted (with one varient being used to
open and/or save files in NotePad's format), ascii, MS Word through
97, Word Perfect 4-6, Word Star and a few more. This program's
functions can be customised but in the default settings can be
accessed either via a menu bar or via Word Star commands. Seriously,
I can't believe the power of this little editor! It even works on
Windows 95/98 machines. I just hope it's accessible. If so, then
I'll be reviewing it here later.
As for the Greek, unfortunately, I can only read and write it in
Windows. Even though there are newer editors and browsers in DOS that
can handle Unicode, I don't have a Greek synthesizer.
Talk soon,
Eleni
PS. I adore WebbIE but are there any plans of updating it? It no
longer works on certain webpages.
On 7/25/10, Alasdair King <[email protected]> wrote:
There are two unrelated issues here.
1 How characters are encoded in the file - ANSI, DBCS and so on.
2 How newlines are encoded.
Newlines first. There is no consistent "newline" character (indicating
the end of a line) as there is for the character "a". Instead, Windows
and MS-DOS uses two characters - carriage return CR, 10, and line feed
LF, 13. But Unix (and Apple Mac) uses one character - line feed LF,
13. So a text file can be in Windows/MS-DOS encoding or Unix encoding.
If you open a Unix text file in Notepad you'll find that the newlines
are missing and the whole thing is one big lump of text. WordPad is
smarter and realises the single LF characters should be newlines, so
you don't see this happen.
So if you have a Unix text file - no newlines in Notepad - then you
can open it in WordPad and then save it as Text or MS-DOS Text and
it'll then work correctly in Notepad and DOS. At this point I'm going
to admit that I can't tell why there are two WordPad Save As Text
options. They both produce Windows/MS-DOS format ANSI text files.
Now, character encodings. This is even more complicated. Essentially,
old-style ANSI can give you those files with lots of question marks
and the wrong characters. Use Unicode, which means using the UTF-8 or
the Unicode setting in Notepad or WordPad. Both are Unicode, but
different ways of encoding it - when Windows says "Unicode" is often
means "DBCS". But anyway, Notepad can do either type, as can WordPad.
Here are two files with Greek in them, one in the "Unicode" format,
one in UTF8. Both work in Notepad:
http://development.webbie.org.uk/test/text/Text-Unicode.txt
http://development.webbie.org.uk/test/text/Text-UTF8.txt
Here's a detailed explanation, though some of the text is displayed
using images:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
So I think you should be able to use WordPad to open any file then
save it as Unicode, and all should then be well for Windows machines.
For MS-DOS pre-Windows machines you'll need to save as ANSI, which
means setting the code page of your machine to the language you want
to support - Greek, for example - and accepting that files with
Unicode and non-Greek character will be mangled on your system.
Best wishes,
Alasdair King
WebbIE
On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 12:42 AM, Eleni Vamvakari <[email protected]>
wrote:
So today, I decided to see how Word Perfect 5.1 and Ed.exe would
read files saved as .txt in Notepad and .txt (MS-DOS format) in
Wordpad. The only difference that I noticed is that the lines started
and stopped at different points so that a sentence that began on one
line in one format might have already begun on the line above that in
the other. In both cases, VocalEyes didn't read the sentences
properly in Ed.exe. The words at the end of each line would cut off.
But in Word Perfect 5.1, it read the lines perfectly. I'm baffled by
this, since Ed is from Word Perfect Corporation and even uses the same
commands as 5.1. The only difference is that it saves as .txt and not
as .wpd and it doesn't convert the .txt files to .wpd when you open
them. I then checked the settings in VocalEyes in both programs and
they were the same.
I'm completely confused here. Why is it doing this? I would gladly
use NoteWorthy, as I love that program, but the file was too large for
it to handle. I'd like to try Microsoft Word 5.5, but for some
reason, it's only downloadable as an .exe file and it's over 1.44mb.
The DOS machine that I'm using right now only has a floppy drive (the
pcmcia slot is taken up by the KeyNote Voicecard synth, which I won't
remove unless absolutely necessary) so I have no way of getting the
program on there. It also doesn't have the regular editor that's
supposed to come with MS-DOS 6.21 and I can't seem to find that
anywhere! I on't even know if it's accessible. Can anyone help me or
recommend another editor for me to try? Should I use JAWS or ASAP to
see if I get different results or are the settings in the program
rather than in the screen reader?
Thanks,
Eleni
On 7/14/10, Eleni Vamvakari <[email protected]> wrote:
Last night, I went to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_file#Formats
and still don't completely understand this.
"Most Windows text files use a form of ANSI, OEM or Unicode encoding.
What Windows terminology calls "ANSI encodings" are usually
single-byte ISO-8859 encodings, except for in locales such as Chinese,
Japanese and Korean that require double-byte character sets. ANSI
encodings were traditionally used as default system locales within
Windows, before the transition to Unicode. By contrast, OEM encodings,
also known as MS-DOS code pages, were defined by IBM for use in the
original IBM PC text mode display system. They typically include
graphical and line-drawing characters common in full-screen MS-DOS
applications. Newer Windows text files may use a Unicode encoding such
as UTF-16LE or UTF-8."
So, what's the difference between a Windows and a DOS .txt file.
Does it matter, when reading with a DOS text editor or wordprocessor,
whether I saved the file with Notepad as .txt or saved it with Wordpad
as .txt (MS-DOS format)? If not, then why does Wordpad have a MS-DOS
format option? I'm pretty sure that Notepad doesn't use unicode
because I can't save Greek files with it and always have to use
Wordpad and save them as rtf. I know that files saved as either type
of .txt will read under Word Perfect and NoteWorthy but WP (including
the text editor) acts strangely with VocalEyes at times, not reading
complete lines and sometimes skipping lines, and I'm trying to find
out why it does this. I've installed the set files for Word Perfect
Office, hoping that it would solve this problem, but it hasn't done
so. Interestingly enough, it doesn't do this with all files. I
thought that perhaps it was word wrap, but apparently, it's
automatically set to on, so that might not be the case. I need this
sorted so that I can decide how to save my documents that I'll be
transferring over to the DOS machine, or if it's not the formatting,
then I need to learn what changes have to be made either in VocalEyes
or in Word perfect so that it reads properly.. I'm currently using a
KeyNote Gold laptop, which doesn't have the built-in MS-DOS editor, so
I can't test my files there and NoteWorthy can't handle large files.
I need to save the tutorials that I found for QuickBASIC and for batch
programming, so the sooner this can be resolved the better.
Thanks,
Eleni
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--
Alasdair King
For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit:
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