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 🙂
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My pleasure, if you like my blog you could subscribe and we can stay in touch.
View CommentView CommentCheers ! 🙂
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You need to be a part of a contest for one of the best websites on the internet.
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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
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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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[…] be used to convert basic PDFs or DOC files to listen them if you're lazy to read I've explained on how you can use festival to read speak for you PDFs and DOCs, ODF (Open Document F… […]
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