[mary-dev] Tcl/Tk client

[H. Sasse]

Attached is a Tcl/Tk client for the MARY TTS system.  I know there is 
already a Java GUI client, but my
motivation for this was remarks on the Ubuntu Accessibility list that a 
java solution was inappropriate
for some reason.  Why doesn't really matter.

First, let's deal with what this doesn't do.  At present it doesn't have 
a means to save the sound.  This
could easily be added by cut-and-paste from the existing code, but I 
haven't done it yet.   The Edit menu
only has "select all" on it, and that is not implemented yet.  I wanted 
to leave this open ended as I'd like
to add a facility to insert tags of the correct type and format for the 
various XML dialects in use.  The
"about"on the help menu doesn't do anything yet.  This is pretty much a 
draft version, and until
people have given me feedback, I suppose I'd call it 0.0.1.   The most 
important thing it lacks is the effects sliders.  I've not found an 
easy-to-parse output from the server that will tell me what affects are 
available,
and the parameters and the ranges they take.   I can see the information 
is there from the documentation
but something easy to tokenise would help.  I also have not added the 
keyboard shortcuts to the menus
which should be there for accessibility reasons.  I'd need to read up on 
the conventions for those in order
to make it consistent with curent practice.

What it does do is pick up the list of voices and formats from the 
server, and build the GUI accordingly.
The left window will take input, the right window which is not editable 
by the user will display the output
when that is text.  At startup it shows the list of voices.  The Play 
button will generate the output, including
the audio if that is selected.

I think if this is well recieved and if I can figure out how to do it 
I'd like to add the XML editing features,
saving of sound, and the effects sliders, etc.    However, I think it is 
in a state where it can be used at the moment, and what would be useful 
is feedback, and people with more Tcl/Tk skills improving the code.

I developed this with ActiveState Tcl/Tk 8.5 on Windows, so it doesn't 
use anything too novel, but
there will be portability issues on other platforms.  I've tried to keep 
all the platform specific code
in one place.

     HTH
     Hugh

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