[Solved] How to remove pauses on new lines?

[nextupUser]

I have gone into Tools -> Pauses and Text insertion - and removed all pauses between paragraphs, however, Neospeech Julie still does a slight pause between lines. This is very annoying because when you convert a pdf to text, it adds tons of new lines everywhere. Example...

This is an example "pause here"
of the problem

Help!

[Jim Bretti]

First make sure there is nothing under Tools -> Pauses and Text Insertions that would be causing the pauses. Also, if you have any pronunciation dictionaries defined, it is worth disabling them, just temporarily, to verify that one or more dictionary entries are somehow causing the problem.

Once you have ruled out the possibility that the pauses are not being caused by any settings under the TextAloud Tools menu, the next thing to do would be to create a pronunciation dictionary entry that converts carriage return / linefeed characters in the text to spaces.

Here is how to do it .. from the TextAloud Tools menu, click Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance. Create a new dictionary entry, and configure like this:

1. Set the Text Matching dropdown to 'Regular Expression'

2. For the regular expression, use this:
(\R\s*)+

3. Set Pronounce Using dropdown to 'Respell' and for the respell field, use
<s>

If you're not familiar with Regular Expressions, it is basically just a pattern matching language. Here is how you can read each part of the expression:
\R - matches a hard line ending
\s - matches white space
+ - Plus sign means 'one or more'
* - An asterisk means 'zero or more'

So the expression matches a character sequence that starts with a hard line ending. The expression will match multiple hard line endings if present, and allows for the possibility of some space characters on blank lines.

<s> is used in the Pronounce Using field to represent a space.

So the expression is looking for sequences of hard line endings / white space, and replacing with a single space character.

[nextupUser]

Adding the entry like you suggested did the trick! Thanks!

[AdamC]

Hi,
How do I do this in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC?
Thank you
Adam

[Jim Bretti]

Actually the pronunciation dictionary entry described earlier in this thread should strip newline characters from text regardless of the source. So if you have this dictionary entry configured (and enabled), and it doesn't work from Acrobat, first verify the dictionary entry is working. Use Notepad to enter some sample text including a few carriage return / newline characters, then see if TextAloud pauses at the newlines when speaking the text.

If the dictionary entry works with text from Notepad but not Acrobat, there may be something else in the document causing the pauses. Is it possible for you to mail me a copy of the document? If you can send the document, mail it to me at jim@nextup.com

Also, if you're interested in upgrading to TextAloud 4, TextAloud 4 includes a new feature called 'Speaking Rules' that allows you to control this without creating pronunciation dictionary entries.