Substituting silence for text

[Sentosa]

My main use of TA3 is listening to novels I write.

Maybe because I'm getting older, I'm becoming less tolerant of issues which have not previously bothered me. Let me give you an example.

In my finished manuscripts, I separate scenes with ***. I'm finding it increasingly annoying to have TA proclaim "asterisk asterisk asterisk"
Can I insert a control, or edit the pronunciation dictionary to silence *** or other such features?

This is only an issue when I have TA read back the complete novel or short story. When working on the story, I proof on a scene by scene basis, so TA never encounters ***.

When the work is finished, I like to listen to the whole to see how it hangs together.

Any suggestions?
Sentosa

[Jim Bretti]

Hi Sentosa

There are a couple ways to handle this kind of problem. First, you can filter individual characters, like the asterisk, by creating a character filter. From the TextAloud main menu, click Tools -> Text Processing -> Character Speaking and Filtering. Click the Add button, and on the Add dialog, set the option to "Filter Character". Then list the characters you would like filtered in the Characters ... just list the characters with no delimiter. You can include the asterisk (*) character in the list and any other characters you'd like to filter.

Another thing you can do is add pronunciation dictionary entries to skip specific strings of text. From the Tools menu, click Text Processing -> Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance. Use the Text Matching field to specify the text you'd like to skip, then select "Skip Text" in the Pronounce Using dropdown.

Let me know if this doesn't help.

[Sentosa]

Thanks Jim. Worked perfectly. Obvious after some thought