SPKVIEW V1.0
------------
SPKVIEW.EXE is a WinPack viewer which allows messages to be
spoken by a suitable text to speech program. It is intended that
it should be installed for a file type of "SPK". From V6.22
onwards, WinPack has special support for viewers for this file
type.

Installation
------------
To use SPKVIEW you really need a Sound Blaster card which has
the text to speech program TextOle as one of its bundled
software utilities. However, SPKVIEW.INI makes it possible to
set up SPKVIEW for use with other text to speech programs.

Put SPKVIEW.EXE and SPKVIEW.INI in your main WINPACK directory.

Edit SPKVIEW.INI and make sure that SPEECH_PROG_PATH is correct
for your copy of TextOle or other text to speech program. If you
aren't using TextOle, make sure that the SPEECH_START_KEYS
character sequence is correct for your text to speech program.
Remove the line if your program does not need to be sent any
characters to start it speaking. The characters you specify are
what you would key in to start the program speaking. Use '^' for
Ctrl and '%' for Alt. The default is "^p" which is correct for
TextOle and means Ctrl+p.

In the [DISCARD] section of SPKVIEW.INI you can specify text
strings which, if found in a line in a message will cause that
line to be discarded - see "Preprocessing Rules" below. The
"qqqqqqqq" and "wwwwwwww" are just examples and can be removed
if you wish - they are very unlikely to occur in a message!

Run WinPack, select "File", "Viewers Editor" and install
SPKVIEW.EXE as a viewer for Ext "SPK".

In Use
------
Should anyone send a message with "^.SPK" in the title, WinPack
will offer SPKVIEW as a viewer for that message. However, if you
have WinPack V6.22 or later, you can use SPKVIEW to speak any
message simply by pressing Ctrl+S whilst you are reading the
message.

SPKVIEW preprocesses the message (see below) and creates a
temporary output file which is passed to the text to speech
program. PLEASE NOTE - when TextOle has finished speaking, you
need to manually close it down, it won't automatically close. If
you leave it running, then, when you try and use SPKVIEW on
another message, you simply activate the old copy of TextOle and
it speaks the wrong message!

Preprocessing Rules
-------------------
There is an obvious problem when using a text to speech program
to speak packet messages - headers and fancy signature blocks
don't come out too well! SPKVIEW attempts to get round this
problem by applying the following preprocessing rules:-

If the message contains HTML style tags <SPEECH> and </SPEECH>,
then only text between these tags is included in the output to
the text to speech program. The tags must be on a line
containing nothing other than the tag and there can be several
pairs of tags in one message. Example:-

This text won't be spoken,
and this won't be spoken.
<SPEECH>
This text will be spoken,
and this will be spoken.
</SPEECH>
This text won't be spoken,
and this won't be spoken.
<SPEECH>
This text will be spoken,
and this will be spoken.
</SPEECH>
This text won't be spoken,
and this won't be spoken.
etc...

If a message doesn't contain these tags, then an attempt is
made to remove the headers:-

All lines before and including the last line starting with "R:"
are discarded.
All lines before and including the last line starting with "T:"
are discarded.
All lines before and including the last line starting with
"Path !" and ending with "!" are discarded.
All lines before and including the last line both starting and
ending with "!" are discarded.

To try and avoid the worst effects of sig blocks, any line in a
message which contains a sequence of three similar characters
which aren't normal text characters is discarded. Any line
containing characters, none of which are numbers or letters, is
also discarded.

Any lines containing any of the text strings specified in the
[DISCARD] section of SPKVIEW.INI are discarded.


Roger Barker, G4IDE
roger@peaksys.demon.co.uk

July 1997