Using Special Characters for Pauses and Text Insertions

[PapaLazarou]

Hi,

Is it possible to create pauses wherever there is a selected character such as # or *?

Similar functionality is operational in file splitting by 'keyword'. Would it be possible to add pauses by 'keyword'?

Thanks

[Jim Bretti]

There are a couple ways to do this. First, you can have pauses automatically inserted for specific characters using the Character Speaking and Filtering dialog (Tools -> Text Processing -> Character Speaking and Filtering). On this dialog, click the Add button. Set the Option dropdown to "Pause", and in the Characters field, enter a list of characters you would like to pause at. (There is no delimiter between characters in this list).

Another way is to use TextAloud pronunciation dictionary maintenance. You can create pronunciation dictionaries to insert pauses based on any text match. One advantage here is you can configure your dictionary entry to pause following a character / keyword, or *replace* the character / keyword. Using your example of pausing at # and * characters here's how you could do it:

Set Text Matching to "Regular Expression", and for the expression, use:
[*#]

This expression will match any character contained in the square brackets.

Set the Pronounce Using dropdown to "Respell", and for the respell field, use
$0 {{Pause=1}}

In the expression, $0 references the text matched in the expression, so this inserts a 1 second pause after the character. To replace the matched text, use this as the respell field instead:
{{Pause=1}}