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How do I prevent Textaloud 4 from pronouncing a specific character? I do not it to say 'slash' when it encounters either / or \. I had a simillar problem which I solved with a regex: regular expession : \b([a-z]+)\/([a-z]+)\b pronounce using respell : $1 or $2 This reads word1/word2 as 'word1 or wo...

For tricky pronunciation it can be useful to copy and paste IPA expressions from digital or online dictionaries eg the 'Oxford dictionary of English' or Collins online: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/conge For example congé has an IPA expression kɒ̃nʒeɪ and to use this in TA fo...

In TA4, opening TextAloud and shrinking to the taskbar brings up the floating toolbar. For reading highlighted text with 'mousewatch' enabled I think that you can set the voice you require in the toolbar.

Personalized Dictionaries Phenry makes the case for a 'one size fits all' pronunciation dictionary and I would like to champion the alternative DIY approach. The trouble with a 'one size fits all' dictionary is that it has to be large, includes words that don't need correcting and everything else th...

When I open TextAloud version 4, at the top I see : File Edit View Insert tags Speak Voice Navigation Control Center Help Clicking on Help with the mouse opens the following menu: open data folder open audio output directory support check for updates Now clicking on 'open data folder' opens the fold...

In TA4 click 'help' then click 'open data folder'
I backup the 'Dictionaries' folder .... hope this helps!

The following expression in the respell box works for me.
{{Audio=C:\\snd\\crowdboo.wav}}

In case you haven't found them, here are 2 useful sites that generate IPA phonetic transcriptions which can be copied and pasted .... either American or British:
https://easypronunciation.com/en/englis ... nscription
https://tophonetics.com/

Hi Regie I can sympathize with your problem! Being lazy I tend to look up difficult pronunciations on the web and tend to use the IPA option. An expression for conditionality is given here: https://ythi.net/how-do-you-pronounce/conditionality/english/ So in the respell line of TA4 type the following...

Thanks for the prompt reply Jim. I did have the filter for newline characters switched on. In desperation I have disabled all my dictionaries and that fixed it. I must have a dud regex somewhere. Now need a refresher course on regex! Please delete this thread if appropriate ... apologies for wasting...

I find that TA4 introduces unwanted pauses at newlines introduced mid-sentence as in the following example. A Crowdcube campaign to invest in endurance sports TV(www.endurancesports. tv) has been launched to The automatic pauses in 'speaking rules' are all unchecked. How can this annoying feature be...

Hi I often convert long files to audio books and frequently find features that I would like to edit for which the current search and replace feature seems inadequate. For example, my current file begins each page with the page number followed by the title of the article. I would like to remove this ...

Thanks for adding IPA phonemes to TA4; I use this option a lot with my Ivona voices where it works extremely well. As an example an entry in the respell box for phaeton would be: <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="fˈiː:tən"/> To save a lot of repetitive typing (or copying and pasting) I...

I really like the way that selecting 'mouse watch' allows one to highlight a block of text and then click 'speak' in the floating toolbar to listen. Unfortunately this does not seem to work with the Microsoft Edge browser. By selecting 'watch clipboard' I can use the proof reading window but it woul...

Jim I sent the files as requested.
In the meantime as a workaround I find that saving a file as plain text before loading into TA4 solves the problem.

When searching for words to replace, the editor highlights a word but does not include the final character. Consequently clicking 'replace' does not work. This function is quite important to me as I pre-process long files to correct homographs before generating an audio book. So for example searchin...

In copying text files to the TA4 window ' gets replaced with ’. For example night's becomes night’s. It is easy to correct this with the editing facility but it would be nice to have it corrected at source.

Is it necessary to uninstall TA3 before trying TA4? Is there a summary of the additional features provided by TA4?

I like the new extension and find it convenient to use the floating toolbar to pause, restart and stop the speech. I find it rather inconvenient to have to right click and select 'read from cursor' to restart reading from a new position. Would it be possible to add 'read from cursor' to the floating...

Many thanks for the rapid response Jim. The new extension works well ---- like the chrome extension. I preferred the original toolbar but guess that's just familiarity. Really happy to have TA back in my favorite browser.

I was dismayed to find that the TA3 toolbar in the latest Firefox(Quantum) has been disabled (legacy issues). Is it possible to fix this soon? Moving all my bookmarks to Chrome (which works well) is a hassle that I would rather avoid! Would appreciate an idea of when it can be fixed .... Thanks.

Hello, There is no doubt that TA is one of the best text to audio converters, especially armed with regular expression. But despite my love for the application, I find myself having less need for it. And I recently tumbled on another application that I have discarded long ago, but only to realize t...

I have a short list of the most common homonyms and for long articles/books tend to use the TA text editor to search for these problem words and edit the spelling according to context.The appropriate pronunciation is usually easily identified from visual inspection. I find that this can be achieved ...

One way is to insert a bookmark at the position required for restart.
Insert tags => add bookmark

I noticed that the new Microsoft Edge Browser will open PDF files. I wonder if a reading toolbar would be possible, making PDF more accessible to TA? I just noticed that the TA reading toolbar for Mozilla Firefox (my preferred browser) already works for PDF files. It is only necessary to activate A...

TA works perfectly with Windows 10 ... thanks.
I noticed that the new Microsoft Edge Browser will open PDF files. I wonder if a reading toolbar would be possible, making PDF more accessible to TA?

Hi, TA3 works well on my Windows 8.1 64 bit laptop. As Microsoft is now offering a free upgrade to Windows 10, I am wondering whether there might be any problems running TA3. I would hate to lose the text to speech !!
Would appreciate any advice.
DaveH

I normally pronounce fractions like n1/n2 as "n1 over n2"
For this a simple regex suffices :

regular expression (\d+)[/](\d+)
pronounce as $1 over $2

Hope this helps!

Quantum aka DaveH

With the few IPA entries that I have under the PLS option in Ivona Reader, it seems that Ivona voices pick up these pronunciation corrections before being applied in TextAloud. It might therefore be worth checking whether your pronunciation edits are working in TextAloud with the Ivona voices. You c...