Voiceover isn't supposed to read other languages at this point, so of
course it will pronounce them abominably, just as a friend who knew
only English would pronounce them abominably if the friend applied
English phonetic rules to the reading.. You can et a cepstral voice
or speechissimo in several languages. There may be other options but
those are the ones with which I am familiar. Oh yes, the new system
that David N. is working on that was posted recently will also have
support for languages other than English.
I haven't used bookshare books on the Mac though I'm considering
doing it; I subscribed for a year on linux. But is my understanding
that there is a Mac unpack tool and I think you have to use it for
all or most downloads; not sure about public domain books. I do
remember reading that somebody was having trouble with the unpack
tool but don't know how it was resolved.
It is I believe planned that katieplayer will eventually play
bookshare books but it doesn't at present. I believe greg has a
bookshare2audio program but I don't know how these play once they are
converted; you might check the archives or look on his website. As a
matter of fact, greg's DTBmaker documentation explains how to use
DTBmaker to convert bookshare books to daisy using DTBmaker but I
haven't done this so I don't know what players the resulting books
then play on.
I just went to the bookshare site and looked. You can download public
domain books without the unpack tool but they will habe a .bks
extension. You hae to unzip them; I used the terminal and "unzip" to
unzip the sample I downloaded but since zip files are expanded when
you download them I imagine if you set the default app correctly for
the .bks extension you can get them to expand without using the
terminal; not sure which app you specify. I put the resulting text
file in text edit and could read it fine though of course with
foreign languages you'd have to have a voice to read it or convert it
to audio; of course with a text file you won't have a daisy book.
If you go to the download tools section, you will find a link to the
Mac platform info. You download the unpack installer and follow the
instructions. I did find that I had to use vokeys-shift-space for
most buttons and when I was trying to browse for the applications
folder my mac mini revved up and I even lost voiceover for a while
but eventually thing settled down and at that point applications was
the chosen folder in the popup; it had been Documents when I first
started. From there installation went fine except when it's done you
are given an image and continue or quit and I didn't see a
notification that the install had been successful. Once I had
installed the unpack tool, my .bks file showed up as a bookshare book
and I was able to click on it and open it with the unpack tool; you
won't need a password if it's public domain. Again, this was fine in
text edit and I'm assuming you could read the .html files in safari.
Hth.
--
Cheryl
"Where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also".
