How to handle upper case text

Moderator: Jim Bretti

Post Reply
Jim Bretti
Posts: 1558
Joined: Wed Oct 29, 2003 11:07 am
Contact:

How to handle upper case text

Post by Jim Bretti »

It is possible for upper case text to cause pronunciation problems. One problem is that voices may spell out the words instead of reading them normally. So the text HELLO is spelled out as H-E-L-L-O, instead of read as "hello". Another problem is that a voice may treat short, uppercase words such as SO, NO, SAT and SUN as abbreviations. In this example, the words may be pronounced as "south", "north", "Saturday" and "Sunday".

There are a couple different ways to handle these problems, using the TextAloud Pronunciation Editor. A function called ##LowerCase that converts text to lower case can be used in the Respell field.

Converting a single word to lower case
If the problem is with just a single word, such as SO, you can add a pronunciation dictionary entry that respells SO as so. Use the following settings for the dictionary entry:

Text Matching: Simple Text : SO
Pronounce Using: Respell: so
Word Boundary Condition: Word Boundary Required
[x] Case Sensitive


Converting multiple words to lower case
You can use a regular expression (pattern match) to match a series of words, and convert the matched word to lowercase, using the ##LowerCase function:

Text Matching: Regular Expression: \b(SO|NO|SAT|SUN)\b
Pronounce Using: Respell: ##LowerCase($0)
[x] Case Sensitive


Converting all uppercase words over some minimum length
If you have text that contains a *lot* of upper case text, you may want to convert any words over some minimum length to lower case. For example, to convert uppercase strings that are 3 or more characters in length:

Text Matching: Regular Expression: \b[A-Z]{3,}\b
Pronounce Using: Respell: ##LowerCase($0)
[x] Case Sensitive
Jim Bretti
NextUp.com
Post Reply