Some voices pause at newline characters

[Jim Bretti]

If text contains hard carriage returns / newline characters, we sometimes hear that voices will pause at these characters, making the text difficult to listen to.

You can solve this problem with a TextAloud pronunciation editor entry that strips newline characters from text. The best way to strip newline characters is to strip only the ones that do not follow punctuation. If you strip newline characters between complete sentences, the result is sentences that run together, leading to other pronunciation problems.

From the TextAloud menu, click Tools -> Text Processing Options -> Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance. Add a new dictionary entry, and configure it like this:

Set the Text Matching dropdown to "Regular Expression", and for the expression use
(?<=[\pL\pN])((\pZ*\R+)+)

Then set the Pronounce Using dropdown to "Skip Text".

If you're not familiar with regular expressions, it is a text pattern matching language. In the above expression, \pL matches alpha characters, \pN matches numeric characters, and \R+ matches newline sequences. So the expression is stripping newline sequences that follow alpha numeric characters, with no punctuation in between. If you'd like more info on regular expressions there is a very good reference at http://www.regular-expressions.info