Text-to-Speech and Other KWord Tips

By: Carla Schroder
Thursday, December 13, 2007 09:34:18 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6444/1/

Don't Get Lost In Long Documents

Last week we learned how to create text frames, and how to control text flow across multiple frames. Today we're going to learn some great shortcut for navigating long documents, some simple tricks for managing photo printing, and how to turn on KWord's text-to-speech engine and make it read to you.

Views are great time-savers when you're writing or editing a long document. Open a multi-page document and click View--New View. This opens a second view of your document in a separate window. What I like to do is set both windows at Fit to Width, and then arrange them side-by-side. Then I can easily copy and paste between the two windows. A neat trick is keeping the first window open where I'm working, so I don't lose my place, and do searches in the second window. The second View is not a copy of your document, but your actual document, so any changes you make in either window will appear in both. You can open as many Views as you want.

A variation on Views is View--Split View. Instead of opening a separate window, it divides your active window into two panes that share the same menus and toolbars. View--Splitter Orientation lets you choose a horizontal or vertical split.

One more useful pathfinding utility is Bookmarks. Use these to mark any location in your text with Insert--Bookmark. Give your bookmark a name, then find it again with Tools--Select Bookmark.

Taming Photo Printing

Using frames to control layout gives you so much power and flexibility it should come with a red cape. With a little ingenuity you can solve all sorts of problems. For example, KWord helped me with a vexing photo printing problem. Once upon a time my printer would not make borderless prints of any size. After beating my head on the problem for too long KWord gave me an easy workaround: insert my photos into a KWord document, size them, then print the page. Then I cut them out using a good rotary paper cutter. Just a little extra work for perfect results. (Yes, I know that lots of word processors can do this, including OpenOffice and Abiword, which is a good thing, because spending gazillions of dollars on snooty desktop publishing software is not as fun as it sounds.)

To do this, click on the little blue "Create a new frame for the picture" icon on the left border. This opens a file selector. When you select your picture the cursor changes to a cross, so you can draw a frame and insert the photo with one operation. Right-click on the new frame to open the frames menu, and then use the Frames/frameset properties to set the size and position. Keep in mind that this sets only the display size; it does not change the file size. So if you have a image file of 100KB, you can set the display size to a pinpoint and it will still be 100KB. This is the classic method for creating dumbnails, which are thumbnails that have been reduced this way, instead of resizing them with a real image editor.

In case you were wondering, a routine system update cured the printing problem. I assume it got an updated CUPS driver, but who knows- the ways of the printing gremlins are mysterious.

Text to Speech

KWord has a nicely-functioning speech-to-text capability; it will speak the names of every command in the menus and toolbars. It will also read your own typed text to you. To enable this you need to install the KDE accessibility packages, KTTS (KDE Text to Speech), and the Festival text-to-speech engine. These are packaged differently (as usual) on different distributions. PCLinuxOS has kdeaccessibility-kttsd and festival. Ubuntu and Debian users get kdeaccessibility, kttsd, and festival, plus you must also select a speaker such as festvox-kallpc16k, which is the American English male speaker for Festival. (Run apt-cache search festival to find all the available speakers.)

After installing these, open KWord and go to the Settings--TTS menu. Check the boxes as shown in Figure 1 and click OK. It will then ask you to configure a Talker for KTTS. The KTTS configuration menu should open on the Talker tab. Click the Add button; it will automatically scan your system for available talkers, as Figure 2 shows. Click Apply. Then go to the General tab and make sure that "Enable text-to-speech system (KTTSD)" is checked. Click OK and you're done. Now hover your cursor over any menu command to hear it spoken. It won't speak the main "File, Edit, View" etc. headings, but it will everything else.

Want to hear your own typed text spoken robotically? Click View--Show document structure, which opens a tree view of all of your document elements on the left. Expand Text Frames/Frame Sets, right-click on the frame you want to hear, and select Speak Text. The one thing I haven't figured out how to do is make it stop reading- it keeps going until it's finished, or you close KWord.

Well there are just a few of the things you can do with KWord. Visit the links in Resources for good information on KWord's ODF (Open Document Format) support, and user manuals and help.

Resources

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