Today I wondered if festival supports reading of PDF files on Linux? The answer due to my short research was NO!.
Well though I couldn’t find official program to speak PDFs for me it’s not such a big deal since it’s not so hard to convert PDF files into plain text files in Linux with pdftotext command.
pdftotext is part of the poppler-utils which is a nice package which alsocontains pdfimages – enabling you to extract images from pdfs,
pdftohtml – pdf to html converter and
pdffonts – pdf font analyzier. The normal way to read PDF files via festival is: First use pdftotext to convert your PDF to text file
$ pdftotext filename.pdf outputfile.txt
and then to make computer speak it over festival default configured synthesizer:
$ cat outfile.txt | festival –tts
For convenience I’ve created a small shell script I calledfestival-read-pdf.sh which does this directly.
Please download the festival-read-pdf.sh shell script here Furthermore I wondered how to make the Microsoft Office .doc files to be played throughfestival. On that account It was required something to convert again the .doc file extension to plain text. I came across antiword which I’ve blogged about in my previous post. Thus to carry it via festival you need to: antiword filename.doc | festival –tts I’ve fastly scripted it for some convenience. Download the festival-doc-read.sh script here I’ve also created a third bash script which enables you to select either to play DOC or PDF file in Festival.
Here is a link to the festival’s festival-read-doc-en-pdf.sh PDF, DOC speaker script .
Talking about festival it might be interesting to mention fala – A simple text reader.If you’re a Debian user you’ll be glad to know there is already a package containg fala. Well I hope you’ll find the PDF, DOC festival speech scripts useful. Enjoy
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Tags: enable, Festival, Linux, speak, speech, system
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100709 Trisquel/4.0 (taranis) Firefox/3.6.6
less file.pdf | festival –tts
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pl; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Firefox/3.6.15
hi, can you put again this script?
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
Hi Luka.
Sorry to put a broken link.
Now the script is with correct link and is downloadable.
I hope it’s useful to you.
Looking forward to hear your feedback.
B
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pl; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Firefox/3.6.15
Big thanks! and thank you for your quick reply 🙂
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
My pleasure, if you like my blog you could subscribe and we can stay in touch.
View CommentView CommentCheers ! 🙂
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0
You need to be a part of a contest for one of the best websites on the internet.
View CommentView CommentI will recommend this site!
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20140319 Firefox/24.0 Iceweasel/24.4.0
How can I make festival speak other languages and how can I make ‘text2wave’ – a wrapper for festival – record text in other languages.
thx
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0
Hi you will have to add more festvox, in Debian and Ubuntu to check what kind of extra festvox are there:
apt-cache search festvox
festvox-hi-nsk – Hindi male speaker for festival
festvox-italp16k – Italian female speaker for Festival
festvox-itapc16k – Italian male speaker for Festival
festvox-mr-nsk – Marathi male speaker for festival
festvox-te-nsk – Telugu (te) male speaker for festival
festvox-czech-ph – Czech male speaker for Festival
festvox-kallpc16k – American English male speaker for festival, 16khz sample rate
festvox-kallpc8k – American English male speaker for festival, 8khz sample rate
festvox-kdlpc16k – American English male speaker for festival, 16khz sample rate
festvox-kdlpc8k – American English male speaker for festival, 8khz sample rate
festvox-ru – Russian male speaker for Festival
festvox-suopuhe-common – Common files for Festival Finnish speakers
festvox-suopuhe-lj – Finnish female speaker for Festival
festvox-suopuhe-mv – Finnish male speaker for festival
flite1-dev – A small run-time speech synthesis engine – static libraries
flite – A small run-time speech synthesis engine
festvox-don – minimal British English male speaker for festival
festvox-rablpc16k – British English male speaker for festival, 16khz sample rate
festvox-rablpc8k – British English male speaker for festival, 8khz sample rate
festvox-ellpc11k – Castilian Spanish male speaker for Festival
libflite1 – Small run-time speech synthesis engine – shared libraries
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