I'm looking for something that can read text aloud

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MargaretA

I'm looking for something that can read text aloud

Post by MargaretA »

I think this is called "text to speech", but I'm not positive. I don't need something that will recognize my voice, just something to read text out loud, mostly in PDFs.

I've been using Linux Mint Julia for about a month now, and I have some PDFs that it would be helpful to have a speech reader for. I did some searching online but most of what I found was at least 5 years old. I did come across mention of something called Festival, which I found in Package Manager and marked for installation. I don't know if it installed, though, because it's not on the list of programs I can pull up from the menu on the lower left corner of the screen. And anyway, all the instructions I could find for it talk about using it in the terminal, which won't work for me - I need something I can use for PDFs and I don't want to have to copy and paste everything into the terminal, even if I could figure out the code.

I did also find a suggestion for Orca, which was in the Software Manager. I got it installed, but it's disappeared just like Festival did. The Orca website seems to have a lot of information, but most of it is incomprehensible to me; it seems to be written for programmers. It does say somewhere there that Orca will work with Acroreader, which a search told me was Adobe Reader, which I am familiar with from Windows. But after downloading the Acrobat Reader file I can't figure out how to install it; *another* search found installation instructions, but once again I couldn't understand them.

So I guess I'm starting over. Is there anything I can use in Mint that will do what I want, without having to copy and paste text? And that I can install easily?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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dagon
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Re: I'm looking for something that can read text aloud

Post by dagon »

MargaretA wrote: I did come across mention of something called Festival, which I found in Package Manager and marked for installation. I don't know if it installed, though, because it's not on the list of programs I can pull up from the menu on the lower left corner of the screen. And anyway, all the instructions I could find for it talk about using it in the terminal, which won't work for me - I need something I can use for PDFs and I don't want to have to copy and paste everything into the terminal, even if I could figure out the code.
If a program doesn't show up in the applications list, you most of the time need to use the terminal unfortunately( or it does some voodoo we don't wanna know about ).
Orca is probably the right thing for you as it is integrated in gnome.
I did also find a suggestion for Orca, which was in the Software Manager. I got it installed, but it's disappeared just like Festival did.
Just for the sake of driving you mad, someone decided it should install hidden in the menu. :?
Follow me:
1. Right Click on: Menu
2. Left Click: Edit Menu
3. In the left column. Left Click on Universal Access
4. Check orca!
5. Close

Done... sort of.
There are also a place to setup Assistive technologies / orca...
Menu > Control Centre > Assistive technologies... Finally click; Preferred Applications!

Wowie, you need assistance for the assistance but now you should be done... I hope, I don't have time to dig into it any further right now.
But after downloading the Acrobat Reader file I can't figure out how to install it; *another* search found installation instructions, but once again I couldn't understand them.
Don't install the package you downloaded.
The program Adobe Reader is in the program center /mintinstall and the name is :


acroread
copy the line above to Mintinstalls searchwindow and install.

(EDIT! I first wrote the packagename adobereader-deu... which is perfectly fine if you're from germany. )

Good Luck... :D

EDIT: I've tried orca now and... it takes some getting used to.
MargaretA

Re: I'm looking for something that can read text aloud

Post by MargaretA »

Dagon, thanks for your suggestions; it was good to know there's a way to edit the menu. But that was about the only thing I was able to accomplish when I first tried everything a week ago. Orca was having major problems then, so I uninstalled it. But today, for the sake of resolving this issue one way or another, I decided to try again.

Today, though, I'm having trouble with Software Manager making the screen go dim (I have another thread started about that). After yet another "Force Quit" it seemed that Orca was installed. And it was reading - anything and everything *but* what I want it to read, PDFs.

I did want to try it with Adobe Reader, which it's supposed to work with (the Windows version has a menu option to read text aloud; I'm assuming Acroread does too), but Software Manager isn't working at all right now, so I'm unable to install anything new. I think I'm just going to give up. Even if I could get Acroread installed, and Orca working with it, that voice is really annoying. I feel bad for people with sight problems that really need to use it. I just wanted something that would read stuff while I did something else, like knit. :)

Thanks again for your help.

Meg
Chris_C

Re: I'm looking for something that can read text aloud

Post by Chris_C »

I have Acroread 9.0 and the Read Out Loud feature doesn't work. According to Adobe's site it does work with Linux. I've installed espeak, Mbrola, Speech Dispatcher, Julius and Festival. None seem to work on my pdf (e.g. the Read Out Loud Adobe Reader feature). Running in Festival gives the following:

festival> (tts "ai.pdf" nil)
SIOD ERROR: could not open file ai.pdf
festival>

Followed advice from Adobe Reader 7 that says you also need to install gnome-speech

If it were text Festival and Gespeaker do open and read. Could copy pdf into text editor and read.

Too bad Kindle (Amazon) doesn't have Linux App, it has a text to read feature for PDFs.

Good Luck. I'll be watching this thread to see if another answer comes.
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