🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <j5ifr2$m3c$2@dont-email.me>,
NoHtmlMailsPlease <UsePlainText@dog.edu> wrote:
>My final aim is to have adobe's pdf to speech not
>make unnatural breaks, because of page-breaks which
>don't correspond to paragraph-breaks;
>which is what I get when I use openOffice for 
>text to pdf.
>
>The "hello world" ps-tut doesn't deal with stepping the
>y-coordinates down to the next line.
>
>How should I do this, without getting married to ANOTHER
>programming language?

There isn't any concept of "next line" in PostScript. 

Changing the coordinates can be done in more than one way, which
method is used is up the the program that generates the PostScript
program (or the programmer in the case where you're doing it via a
text editor)

-- 
					-- Rod --
rodd(at)polylogics(dot)com

On Sep 23, 8:11 am, "NoHtmlMailsPlease" <UsePlainT...@dog.edu> wrote:
> My final aim is to have adobe's pdf to speech not
> make unnatural breaks, because of page-breaks which
> don't correspond to paragraph-breaks;
> which is what I get when I use openOffice for
> text to pdf.
>
> The "hello world" ps-tut doesn't deal with stepping the
> y-coordinates down to the next line.
>
> How should I do this, without getting married to ANOTHER
> programming language?
>
> ==TIA

Well, you need to download (or buy) the Adobe books. The Blue
Book is a better tutorial than anything else (and free online),
and the cookbook section has good ideas to get you started.
For the kind of stuff you're describing you certainly will
need to "get married" to postscript, as you say.

The book for what you're trying to do is the Green Book. It
explains how to design the postscript programs that produce
documents. But you won't understand it without having done
the prep work.

While the Red Book (Postscript Language Reference Manual or
PLRM) is available online, the third edition is quite
overwhelming. I strongly recommend to anyone learning
postscript that they buy a first edition manual. It's less
than 1 inch thick! It has the stuff you need. The operator
summary tells you what page to find the details on.
It really is a nice, concise manual.

If any of this fires your imagination, I recommend
Postscript By Example. I'm too sleepy to praise this book
adequately.

"Rod Dorman" <rodd@panix.com> wrote in message 
news:j5ildf$cgu$1@reader1.panix.com...
> In article <j5ifr2$m3c$2@dont-email.me>,
> NoHtmlMailsPlease <UsePlainText@dog.edu> wrote:
>>My final aim is to have adobe's pdf to speech not
>>make unnatural breaks, because of page-breaks which
>>don't correspond to paragraph-breaks;
>>which is what I get when I use openOffice for
>>text to pdf.
>>
>>The "hello world" ps-tut doesn't deal with stepping the
>>y-coordinates down to the next line.
>>
>>How should I do this, without getting married to ANOTHER
>>programming language?
>
> There isn't any concept of "next line" in PostScript.

My brief look at the docus suggests that <newLine> could be programmed as:
/Nline <decr y-coordinate per font size>
  <move abs x-coordinate to line-start> def

but I was hoping for a briefer method from here.
>
> Changing the coordinates can be done in more than one way, which
> method is used is up the the program that generates the PostScript
> program (or the programmer in the case where you're doing it via a
> text editor)
>
> -- 
> -- Rod --
> rodd(at)polylogics(dot)com
 

"luser- -droog" <mijoryx@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:63fea13a-e003-48c6-ac27-e355eb83ffe0@g33g2000yqc.googlegroups.com...
> On Sep 23, 8:11 am, "NoHtmlMailsPlease" <UsePlainT...@dog.edu> wrote:
>> My final aim is to have adobe's pdf to speech not
>> make unnatural breaks, because of page-breaks which
>> don't correspond to paragraph-breaks;
>> which is what I get when I use openOffice for
>> text to pdf.
>>
>> The "hello world" ps-tut doesn't deal with stepping the
>> y-coordinates down to the next line.
>>
>> How should I do this, without getting married to ANOTHER
>> programming language?
>>
>> ==TIA
>
> Well, you need to download (or buy) the Adobe books. The Blue
> Book is a better tutorial than anything else (and free online),
> and the cookbook section has good ideas to get you started.
> For the kind of stuff you're describing you certainly will
> need to "get married" to postscript, as you say.
>
> The book for what you're trying to do is the Green Book. It
> explains how to design the postscript programs that produce
> documents. But you won't understand it without having done
> the prep work.
>
> While the Red Book (Postscript Language Reference Manual or
> PLRM) is available online, the third edition is quite
> overwhelming. I strongly recommend to anyone learning
> postscript that they buy a first edition manual. It's less
> than 1 inch thick! It has the stuff you need. The operator
> summary tells you what page to find the details on.
> It really is a nice, concise manual.
>
> If any of this fires your imagination, I recommend
> Postscript By Example. I'm too sleepy to praise this book
> adequately.

Some times I say "I want to speak to the injun-year & not
the sales-clerk ", but let me rather admit how I failed to
see-the-wood-for-the-trees. Since my final aim is only
to NOT have page-breaks in the middle of sentences,
all I needed to do was, use an editor/word-proc, which
can output ps/pdf, and manually <adjust each end of page>.

But the first one which I did this on, & moved it from linux to
Win7 via a stik; the Adobe-dolly said
dot dot dot ....why.

That's "why" as in Y.
Which is strange, since the *.pdf looked perfect under Win7 & linux.

Oh crap!! I've just realised: it's not how the *.pdf LOOKs,
it's whether it can be `pdftoascii  -ed`.
Since the failed-to-talk *.pdf was derived from ascii, I'd
expect that to NOT be the problem.

And I'd like to discuss OCR for pdf/ps which won't autoconvert
to ascii, with people who can think-out-of-the-box.

 

In article <j5scc5$pak$1@dont-email.me>,
NoHtmlMailsPlease <UsePlainText@dog.edu> wrote:
>"Rod Dorman" <rodd@panix.com> wrote in message 
>news:j5ildf$cgu$1@reader1.panix.com...
>>  ...
>> There isn't any concept of "next line" in PostScript.
>
>My brief look at the docus suggests that <newLine> could be programmed as:
>/Nline <decr y-coordinate per font size>
>  <move abs x-coordinate to line-start> def

Define what you mean by "per font size". Is that something your
PostScript emitting program is tracking or are you expecting the
PostScript RIP to somehow figure it out for you?

Consider a "line" that starts off with a 16 point high ornamental
character EPS followed by a mix of 12 point Helvetica and 10 point
Palatino-Bold characters.

You'll need to "decr y-coordinate" by at least 16 points (probably a
little more to avoid decenders) before emitting the PostScript code
for that "line".

In PostScript you first position the baseline before drawing the text
which means you have to figure out how tall that line is going to be
before you can do the move.

-- 
					-- Rod --
rodd(at)polylogics(dot)com

On 23/09/2011 14:11, NoHtmlMailsPlease wrote:
> My final aim is to have adobe's pdf to speech not
> make unnatural breaks, because of page-breaks which
> don't correspond to paragraph-breaks;
> which is what I get when I use openOffice for text to pdf.

There is almost certainly no existing program that creates PDF files 
suitably optimised for a specific PDF-to-speech application.


> The "hello world" ps-tut

Perhaps you mean 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#.22Hello_world.22 or something 
very like it.

> doesn't deal with stepping the
> y-coordinates down to the next line.
>
> How should I do this, without getting married to ANOTHER
> programming language?

You can't do this in Postscript without learning the Postscript 
programming language to an elementary level of competence.

You could try 
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~zben/PostScript/asciiprint.html but I've no 
idea whether it produces PS from which GS can produce PDF from which 
your PDF-to-speech application can produce intelligible speech.


If your goal is to convert some existing text to something that is very 
well suited to a text-to-speech application, I believe it would be best 
to avoid PS or PDF as initial or intermediate formats.

I would evaluate using either plain-text or one of the more common 
book-reader formats (e.g. mobi). I believe some models of Kindle can 
read books aloud, perhaps their PC "kindle" software also can.

-- 
RGB