Text to Speech

[starlight]

Hi,

just put a short biog  into my kindle to play on  text  to speech.
everything was ok, then suddenly instead of  reading the words the kindle began
spelling out  each word.

Looking at the text I noticed the font style had changed to a thinner, more spaced font.

Ive tried putting the text into various  software  and resaving in,  but  it always
appears in kindle with this change of font.


quote
for the next few years the surviving children remained at home together, creating a rich imaginary  world, sparked by their father’s gift to branwell of a set of toy soldiers.
Because of the important role education            had played in his own life, patrick encouraged his children in  their pursuit of knowledge.
Any books that came their way were eagerly devoured, and the children produced their own tiny  illustrated books, designed to be small enough for the toy soldiers, with minuscule handwriting to  deter the prying eyes of the parsonage adults.
end quote

the  change of font style comes after the word  education( ive made a space in the text.
before that space it was reading ok,  after... it began to spell out each letter  !

thanks for any comment

[slkissinger]

A couple of suggestions...

If you want to just get past that, turn off TTS, and page forward past that font change.  then turn tts back on.

Otherwise, simply call Amazon tech support, and see what they say about it.  maybe it's a known issue with a known fix.

[starlight]

once  the font changes  thats it, for the rest of the biog

if you put the  quoted text above   into your kindle,  I think you will probably see the change
of  font  too and   how it  plays in text to speak.
Its very unusual,
Ive tried all kinds of things,  sendint it in e mail 
putting it in open office,
putting  the text into word pad...   etc
but nothing seems   to  change the appearance in  kindle.

[Morf]

It looks like you've got some formatting in your text which hasn't been removed by your tests, possibly because all the tools you've tried support formatting in text. You need to use Notepad.

To test this, I cut the quote and pasted it into Notepad, and removed the spare spaces so I had this:

for the next few years the surviving children remained at home together, creating a rich imaginary  world, sparked by their father’s gift to branwell of a set of toy soldiers.
Because of the important role education had played in his own life, patrick encouraged his children in  their pursuit of knowledge.
Any books that came their way were eagerly devoured, and the children produced their own tiny  illustrated books, designed to be small enough for the toy soldiers, with minuscule handwriting to  deter the prying eyes of the parsonage adults.

In Notepad I then selected File... Save and saved as "quote.txt" in my Kindle's Documents folder.

I had no strange fonts and no problems with TTS, it played fine on my Kindle.

Try the same test yourself, cutting the text from your post on here (not from your original file) and I bet it will work fine.

So, my suspicion is that there are some hidden formatting characters in the quote, probably a remnant from whatever you copied it from. Tools such as email, Open Office and Word Pad will all maintain that formatting.

Notepad, on the other hand, only supports plain text so any formatting will be stripped out. (So does the software here on KindleBoards, which is why the formatting has disappeared!)

If you want to do this sort of thing, when you copy the text and the paste it, look to see if the app has a "Paste Special" command, and if it does, paste as unformatted text. If it doesn't, paste into Notepad first then copy and paste from there.

[starlight]

THANKS  for  those  suggestions,  but  Ive been   working with  note  pad all along
its basic as you say and   using  word pad should cut out any previous formatting.

Ive also tried  posting into a forum and  cut and paste from there... still no joy.

I just  saved another short article from the net  and  pasted it into   notepad  ,
then  dragged it  into  documents folder on kindle.

to my dismay  2  pages were ok...  then the  wide spacing format began.... as in
the previous  biog  I  put  in.

It looks to me now that kindle  is    formatting 2 or  so pages  in   one font,
then  .... after  a meg or  so .... its  reverting to the wide  format
why its doing that I   dont  know  !

Anyway,  Ill  go and look a bit closer at your  suggestions.

[starlight]

Im  thinking  that it  worked for you  because you only posted    a  small  chapter into your
kindle.
 I  wonder if you tried posting  6 or  7  pages  of  text,   would the font change
say on page  3  ?

Effectively what Ive got  is the ability to play 2  pages  in  text to speech, then
when t  to   s  hits the  different font.... its all over !

[starlight]

Its  strange because, over the weeks Ive put  articles in,  some  20  pages or  more
and  looking back over them  now,  they seem ok,  the font  isnt changeing after 2 pages.


 Its just these last  2  articles Ive put in there  that both change font after
2  pages.

[Morf]

Starlight,

I'd like to help but the problem is you really aren't explaining consistently where your problem lies.

For instance, earlier you said:

if you put the  quoted text above   into your kindle,  I think you will probably see the change of  font  too and   how it  plays in text to speak.

I did this and reported no problems, now you're saying:

Im  thinking  that it  worked for you  because you only posted    a  small  chapter into your
kindle.
 I  wonder if you tried posting  6 or  7  pages  of  text,   would the font change
say on page  3  ?

If you can explain in more detail what you are doing, sufficient that I can copy the steps exactly, then I might be able to work out what's going wrong.

Also, bear in mind that Notepad and Wordpad are very different from each other, Wordpad does include formatting. For plain text use Notepad.

Finally, I notice all your posts have strange formatting - sometimes you have a single space between words, sometimes a double space, and the line breaks in your posts are strange. Are you typing like this intentionally, or maybe you are running something unusual which is putting formatting in.

I'm afraid I can't look at this further tonight (it's late in the evening over here), but I'm still fairly sure the problem is formatting in the text you are using rather than a fault in the Kindle.

Try the steps I described above using Notepad with your several pages of text and see what happens.

[starlight]

I  thought........... if  I  cut  out the  first  two  pages of the article ... the pages
where the font is ok in kindle....  I bet the new file  will have the  new first 2 pages ok

I   did that,  put it in kindle and sure enough the  first two pages  were ok,  then on
page 3  and for the rest of the article  it is the wide font  that the   text to speech wont
read  normally.

This  proves that it is not  some  font  formatting  from the net,  its  my  kindle that is doing
it  treating the  first  2 pages  of  text  as normal,  then for some reason changeing the
rest of the text .

I have an aweful feeling that this has become a default  setting and   whatever future text... articles  e mails  etc  I  put  in there  to read  or  listen  via   text to speech....  Im going to
get the same result    !!

( I  wonder if my guarantee  covers this  ? )

[Morf]

Starlight,

Look back at your own post above. Once again, there are different spaces in between words, and the lines end at different places.

if<space><space>I<space><space>cut<space><space>out<space>the<space><space>first<space><space>two<space><space>pages<space>of

Unless you are typing like this intentionally, I think there is something running on your PC which is putting strange formatting in your text.

If this is the case then it could be causing the problem when you edit the file, inserting formatting when you deleted the first pages.

[Morf]

Get one of the files that has the problem, upload it to a sharing site like mediafire or rapidshare, and post the link here.

I'll download it tomorrow sometime and take a look at it.

[starlight]

lol ...  dont  worry about my  typing...   I sometimes hit the  spacer  twice


as I   said,  I  truncated the  article,  I chopped off the first  2  pages
and  reposted the file into  kindle....
if your  "previous formatting" theory is true, then all the  post should
have been in the spaced font

   but  no,  the     first  two pages  of the new
file  were ok then on page 3 (as before )      the  diff spaced    font  appeared

which proves that its not  formatting in the text  I put  in .

Kindle is doing it  for some reason !

Ive  got about  13.6 meg of  articles     up there in  documents theres no prob with
any of them.... they all have the  standard font and all play in  text to speech.

There is  lots of free space up there  2.8  gig

jUST  did a new test.... copied  6 or  so pages from a biog  from  notepad   put it into  Notepad

  drag and dropped the  new  file into kindle.

sure enough...   3  pages  of  normal font, then on page 4  ... the  dreaded   spaced font

its happening  every time !




.

[Morf]

OK, so as I said, take one of the test files which is causing problems, upload it somewhere so I can download it and I'll take a look.

[starlight]

Ok  ,
 this was the last  test  I  did, 
I  just  went into  kindle,  sent the  notepad  file  into  documents
and  sent to  media  fire
go  here
http://www.mediafire.com/?cncxxjcww5ur51m

[Morf]

Hmmm, interesting! 

I've downloaded your file, and I can't see any strange formatting in it, but I've transferred it to my Kindle and it does exactly the same thing!

I think that spaces are being inserted between all the letters, which is why it looks strange, and why the Kindle TTS is spelling it letter by letter. Why those spaces are there, though, I have no idea.

Still, we've moved on in that it's not just your Kindle that has the problem, so we should be able to work out what's causing it. I've got some ideas I want to experiment with, but it may take a few hours for me to get to it, so leave it with me and I'll get back to you when I get anywhere.

[starlight]

Im surprised that has happened,  I thought things would be ok in your kindle.
after all you are simply putting  basic  text in there.

 Its  strange that Ive  put   15 or  so  similar  biogs and  articles in  ( all with notepad  ) and the formatting is ok  they all work with  text to speech.

why should this suddenly start up now  ?

[Morf]

OK, well the good news...

I know what's causing the problem.

The bad news...

I don't know why it's happening!

The file you've passed over, although text, is text encoded in a strange way - it's UCS-2 Little Endian, which uses two bytes for each character and is normally used to provide support for multiple non-roman character sets (Chinese, Japanese, Russian etc).

Notepad normally creates Ansi or UTF encoded text, but it appears it will support UCS-2 encoded text. The Kindle, however, doesn't like the UCS-2 encoding.

Why is your text UCS-2 Little Endian encoded? I have no idea. It's probably due to the source that you are copying it from.

What to do about it? Download and install Notepad++ http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ and use this. If you open your text files with it, and look it the bottom right-hand corner it tells you the encoding (UCS-2 Little Endian). From the Encoding menu, pick "Convert to ANSI" (or UTF-8) and save the file. Firstly, the new file will be about half the size of the old one (single byte rather than double byte), and secondly it then seems to work fine with the Kindle.

You can copy the text you want, paste it into Notepad++, convert it to ANSI and save it to your Kindle and I think it will then work OK.

Try it out and let me know.

[starlight]

Try as I might,  I  could nt get hold of the  notepad  software
from the  link you  posted,  in the end I  went to  file hippo and got it no probs.

Just  put some text in   with the new version and bingo... everything works.
problem  solved. 
I ll have to remember to use the new notepad version in future... although
I think the old one is still up there !

Funny you ve never come accross this prob before ....
but then  in my case it was the  text to speech  feature that sold me on
the kindle,  I listened to the voices on   U  tube  and decided they
were pretty good  so  went ahead.
Since I   got the kindle Ive used it a lot for  text to voice
and  playing  mp3s.

Thanks  for taking the time to  figure it out..
guess  in the  end  its all good feedback for the old  kindle !

[Morf]

No problem, glad to be of help.

I always like the "interesting" questions like this one that take some fathoming out!