I am currently trialing TextAloud 4, and it is looking great. I have used another TTS product for years that has some annoying issues so I thought it was time to find a better solution. So one of the annoying problems is pauses in text copied from PDF, Word Docs or web pages, specifically around dot points and headings that don't end in full stops. My previous TTS app and TextAloud 4 both read these as one big long sentence, which makes it hard to follow.
Now I see that TextAloud 4 has some great options to assist with this that my previous TTS app did not:
- Settings
- Speaking Rules
- Automatic Pauses
- Pause between sentences
- Pause at 1 or more new line characters
- Pause at 2 or more new line characters
- Other Rules
- Insert periods at newline characters for lines that do not end with punctuation
- Automatic Pauses
- Speaking Rules
Consider the following text:
When I copy this to the clipboard and read it directly from there with TextAloud 4, with none of the options turned on, it does not pause after the heading, or after the end of each dot point.
There is no combination of options I can find that fixes this, that does not break something else. For example, if I turn on the option for "Insert periods at newline characters for lines that do not end with punctuation", this works perfectly for heading and dot points, they read beautifully with this option on. However it breaks all the other sentences. This is because the PDF has a new line at the end of each line. For example if I copy that text out of the PDF and into NotePad++ it looks like this:
And so TextAloud 4 pauses at the end of each line, which is mid sentence on most lines.Pre-Market Gappers
Experienced traders are sensitive to being in the right stocks at the
right time. As I mentioned, traders are only as good as the stocks they
trade. I and the traders in our community use a scanner every morning
that is programmed to find Stocks in Play based on the following
criteria:
Stocks that in the pre-market gapped up or down at least 2%
Stocks that have traded at least 50,000 shares in the pre-market
Stocks that have an average daily volume of over 500,000
shares
Stocks that have Average True Range of at least 50 cents (how
large of a range a stock has on average every day)
There is a fundamental catalyst for the stock
As a rule, I do not trade stocks with an enormous short interest
higher than 30% (the short interest is the quantity of stock
shares that investors or traders have sold short but not yet
covered or closed out)
Why these criteria?
This is really frustrating, I feel like I am so close to a solution with TextAloud 4, but so far it has eluded me. Is there a way to solve this problem so that headings and dot points that do not end in full stops as well as normal sentences that span over multiple lines and include new line characters mid sentence, can all be read the way a human would read with the correct pauses?
Eg; Pause after Headings & Dot Points with no full stops, and pause after full stops.
Thank you for your time.
UPDATE:
I have found that if I copy the text from ebooks origional format AZW3, it does not have a line break at the end of each line and then the setting "Insert periods at newline characters for lines that do not end with punctuation", works perfectly!!.... except for when the dot point ends in brackets. For example:
All the text in the above quote gets read as a single line. When I copy it to the clipboard and paste into NotePad++ it looks like this:
- Here is the first (dot point)
Here is some additional text.
- Here is the second (dot point)
Also I have found that with numerical dot points, the numbers do not get read. I am not sure if it is possible to fix this as when I copy the numbered dot points from the eBook reader "Calibre", and paste into NotePad++, it strips out the numbers and just leaves them in a format like the above with each one separated by a line break.Here is the first (dot point)
Here is the first second (dot point)
Here is some additional text.
Maybe the solution here is to get a better eBook viewing program, so that it copies all the data required (like the numbers in numbered lists). Do you have any suggestions for this?
Thanks again for your time.