Ommited index marks in SSML with eSpeak

[Hynek Hanke]

> I was interested in your theory that punctuation in the SSML tags was 
> messing up the callbacks so I changed my program to completely 
> eliminate punctuation in words spoken (except for the apostrophe) and 
> to replace the word in the SSML tag with a number representing the 
> byte offset from the start of the page being read.

Hello, this proved to be a workaround for the SSML index marks bug 
related to punctuation that I observed with eSpeak. However, the index 
marks still do not work well with eSpeak. With latest 
festival-freebsoft-utils, your application works with Festival very 
reliably.

>   I find that this has no effect.  The highlighting falls behind at 
> exactly the same spot.

Well, the only problem is that certain index marks are never delivered. 
Your application would be much more robust (and I think you would hardly 
notice the described bugs) if you relied on the content of the index 
marks rather than on their count. Now that you use text position as the 
content of the index mark, I believe you should use the returned 
position for highliting and that could practically fix the problem.

There is still the problem that eSpeak doesn't seem to return some index 
marks (or perhaps there is some problem with the communication with the 
output module in Speech Dispatcher). To be able to solve this, I'd need 
assistence of Jonathann or a way to test index marks directly in eSpeak. 
Both the punctuation problem reported and now also this another problem 
which is unrelated to punctuation happen also with espeak 1.37.

Thanks for helping to track down these issues,
Hynek Hanke
,