Hi Shaun. Are you on ichat? I was thinking that automator is one of
those things that would be easier to show rather than explain. So if
we could do the ichat screen sharing thing some time, that might be
easier.
Darcy
On 5-Dec-07, at 10:35 PM, VaShaun Jones wrote:
Either Jane or Darcey, can I contact either of you for a
understanding of Automator?
On Dec 5, 2007, at 10:16 PM, Jane Jordan wrote:
Hello Darcy.
I don't know of a range of values. I e-mailed the accessibility
folks and they sent me a link to a really complicated reference on
controling speech output with commands embedded in text. As an
example, they gave me the rate control, but there's lots more that
I haven't even begun to play with.
What I am *really* curious about doing now is, say, editing a file
to have certain characters read with certain voices, for example,
and have a narrator voice. But that will be a while coming. I may
just have to write a test file and see how it works.
I may be able top play more tomorrow--the doctor has told me she
would prefer it if I stayed home to try and get better from this
cold--so I will see if I can come up with more.
But yes, to get back to the original question. All I did was put
left-bracket left-bracket rate 300 right-bracket right-bracket at
the very top of the document, left it open in Textedit, and ran the
application. I am trying to figure out how to get text from email,
hav e it delete certain text, and then run it, but I don't know if
that is possible.
To the other person who wanted to ask questions, I can *try* and
help, but I think actually Darcy is a little more experienced than
me; he was the one that explained the very basics--he deos more
with it thatn I am doing at the moment--though I am working on
changing that, at least as far as creating books goes. Which makes
me wonder---if I put embedded commands into a text file, and ran it
through books2burn, i wonder how well that owuld work? I *think*
it would work well. I am doing the Say one for now, because it
simply seems to be faster. My one gripe with my automator action
er application so far is that it automatically names the file audio
text.aiff, and places it on the desktop, and what I want to do is
to have it have the same name as thbe original file, except for
audio at the end. Ideally, I woul.d have it convert to mp3, but I
don't know if that can be done without me playing it in iTunes.
Can it?
I apologize--the toddler is sleeping, and I am just sitting down to
think and so all this came up.
Jane
On Dec 5, 2007, at 9:27 PM, Darcy Burnard wrote:
Hi Jane. This is cool. So then do you just place the rate
command in the text itself? Also, you used rate 300 in your
example. What is the range of values you can put in there?
Darcy
On 5-Dec-07, at 6:15 PM, Jane Jordan wrote:
OK, so I could have done this in Terminal, I guess, but Terminal
was proving to be difficult to get to work right.
I did an automator work flow that takes text from TextEdit and
converts it into an audio file.
If you put left-bracket left-bracket rate 300 right-bracket right-
bracket
you will get Say to read the file at that speed. I spelled out
the symbols, otherwise Voic eOver would interpret them as a
command and you'd suddenly start having very fast speech! Or
slow, depending on how you like your Mac to talk to you.
Anyhow, now I am experimenting with ways tomake it even more
interesting,. It seems that saving a Workflow as an Application
is the best way to go.
Jane
