Handling text that does not have punctuation

[Jim Bretti]

In some cases your text may just be a list of items, separated only by newline character(s), with no end of sentence punctuation. Some voices will pause automatically at the newline characters, others will not. Text is very difficult to listen to if the voice doesn't automatically pause at newline characters.

Here are two ways to handle this problem.

TextAloud Pauses and Text Insertions
First, you can configure TextAloud to automatically pause at newline characters. From the TextAloud menu, click Tools -> Text Processing -> Pauses and Text Insertions. Click the Add button to configure an automatic text insertion, and configure the dropdown boxes like this:

Profile: All Profiles
Type of Insertion: Insert Pause
Insert At: Between Paragraphs (1 or more lines)

Then enter a pause value in seconds. You can use decimal values, so using a pause value of 0.5 will insert a half second pause.

Make sure the text insertion is enabled, and click OK to save your changes and close the dialog.

Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance
Another way to handle the problem is to use pronunciation dictionary maintenance to automatically insert a period when an alphanumeric character is followed by a newline character. From the TextAloud menu, click Tools -> Text Processing -> Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance. Add a new dictionary, and use a regular expression to find alphanumeric characters followed by newline character(s). Configure the dictionary entry like this:

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

Set the Pronounce Using dropdown to "Respell", and place one character, a period, in the respell field.

The regular expression is looking for letters (\pL), numbers (\pN), single / double quote characters, optionally followed by spaces (\pZ*) and one or more newlines (\R+).

If you're not familiar with regular expressions it is a text pattern matching language. There is a good reference at http://www.regular-expressions.info/ if you need it.