Awesome

                  Bard Storyteller 0.12 Sep 2017
                     http://festvox.org/bard/
                  https://github.com/festvox/bard

Bard Storyteller is a text reader. Bard not only allows a user to read books, but can also read books to the user using text-to-speech. It supports txt, epub and (x)html files.

Bard Storyteller is free software, distributed under a BSD-like license.

Bard depends on CMU Flite (cmuflite.org) for both some general C utilities and for synthesis itself. Bard is targeted at small portable devices such as smart phones, not so smart phones and offline devices, but also works on laptops and desktops. The original target platform was the open hardware Ben Nanonote from sharism.cc (http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote).

In addition to source code support for standard Linux and Windows support, binary distributions are available for Ben Nanonote, Open Pandora and GCW Zero.

Bard uses libSDL (http://www.libsdl.org -- 1.2) to provide graphics, sound and input, thus aiming at multiple platforms. Bard is written in C.

Bard was written by Alan W Black (awb@cs.cmu.edu) as a better ebook reader for him to use, and as a tool to improve CMU Flite's speech synthesis API.

Bard was somewhat inspired by various ebook reading apps I've used on various PDAs and phones. Most recently, after downloading Lecturer http://code.google.com/p/lecturer/ by Ulrich Hecht, and adding Flite support to Lecturer, I saw it might be easy to write a full text reader myself from scratch, so I did.

I'd like this to be TTS engine neutral but its not.

At present the kal_diphone voice is built in, but any dumped Flite cg voice may be specified on command line with

-voice file:///home/.../VOICE.flitevox
 

If initially started with -voices_dir PATH, voices may be loaded within Bard and remembered for particular files that are being read. At present 16KHz (order 25) cg voices are too slow for the Ben Nanonote but are fine on faster devices (e.g. Open Pandora, Rasberry Pi, GCW Zero etc).

It can be run fully from the graphical page, using game console keys only, but also can use a standard keyboard.

From 0.11, Bard supports multiple fonts including Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Korean, Japanese, Devanagari, Tamil and Telugu (with proper kerning when libharfbuzz is compiled in).

Alan W Black                                email: awb@cs.cmu.edu
Language Technologies Institute             http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/
Carnegie Mellon University                  tel: +1-412-268-6299  
5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA, 15213, USA. fax: +1-412-268-6298

DEPENDENCIES

flite-2.1
libSDL 1.2
libSDL_ttf 2.0

Both are available from http://www.libsdl.org

For epub (which is optional)

libzip http://www.nih.at/libzip/

Note we need both zip.h and zipconf.h installed before configure will enable epub support.

For epub images you also need

libSDL_image
libSDL_gfx

COMPILATION

git clone https://github.com/festvox/flite
cd flite
./configure && make && make voices
export FLITEDIR=`pwd`
cd ..

git clone https://github.com/festvox/bard
cd bard
./configure
make

./bin/bard -voices_dir $FLITEDIR/voices

Bard requires access to a .ttf font, at configuration time it tries to find this in /usr/share/fonts, but it might not succeed in finding the right one. You can edit config/config and add a (full) pathname to a .ttf font. For development I used LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf (you probably want a serif font). You can get the Liberation fonts from

https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/

Or DejaVu fonts from

http://dejavu-fonts.org

If it can't automatically find one, you can specify a full path name to one

./bin/bard -font /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf

And it will remember that for future calls (it saves the font pathname in $HOME/.bard_config on exit)

From version 0.11, Bard supports multiple fonts, and relates them to the current file. Bard supports at least Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Korean, Japanese, Hindi (Devanagari), Tamil and Telugu (the last three with proper kerning if used with libharfbuzz). If started with -font_dir PATH a font menu window will be available to allow you select an appropriate font. Google's Noto Fonts have an appropriate license and have good coverage for most languages https://www.google.com/get/noto/. Speech Synthesis in these languages is also support when we have a voice in that language.

A config file is created in $HOME/.bard_config. You might need to remove that if things fail to work out properly. This stores customized colors, fonts and also what your current file (and position) is and up to 20 recent files and positions. I am trying to make that robust over version upgrades, and have succeeded so far.

BASIC COMMANDS ARE

tab    Toggle speech mode
space  Toggle scrolling
f      display file selection window
       arrow keys, home, page down, and enter for selection
g      display general parameters (macro navigation, volume, speed)
h      display help
r      recent files
m      menu (of other pages)
v      voice select
c      font select
i      Increase font/volume up/increase scroll speed
o      Decrease font/volume down/decrease scroll speed
vol up/down (F11/F12) control scroll speed, volume or page up/down

You can navigate a page with pagedown, home and cursor keys within a page. Page up is harder than I thought, it does something useful, but may be not always exactly what you want.

The general parameters page ('g') displays file name, position, speech volume, speed, battery status (if supported), and current time. If you use the arrow keys to position over "<<<" and ">>>", pressing enter will modify the values. Currently the battery status on the my Nanonote is found by running a script called "battery" and taking $2 field in the result. (This works for my battery script but probably not yours). You can make it run your battery script by specifying it on the command line with -battery_script SCRIPT (or editing the .bard_config file).

The volume keys on the Ben Nanonote (F11 F12) provide control for scroll speed, volume or page up/down depending the current state (scrolling, speaking or nothing, respectively) (Shoulder buttons L1/R1 do the same thing on machines with shoulder buttons)

This version doesn't support a mouse (or touch screen) but later versions will (as well as whatever buttons you have on your mobile device).

FONTS

Fonts are harder than you think. As of 0.11 Bard supports selecting fonts with files, if started with the -font_dir DIR argument. With harfbuzz support on, Bard will properly display Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, and many Indian scripts (Devnagari, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil) and probably more. Rendering and proper kerning happen under harfbuzz, without it rendering will not be correct for languages that require it (e.g. halant in devnagari). There is no support for right to left languages yet (e.g. Arabic script).

The system will guess the font when loading a file, from your previous font selections and an internal list, but you can always override the selection in the font menu.

VOICES

In addition to fonts, Bard also supports synthesis for other languages, if started with the -voices_dir DIR argument. At present we only distribute voices for Hindi, Tamil and Telugu (and English). Voices however need to be explicitly selected for new files (it will default to the previously selected voice). The Hindi, Telugu and Tamil voices will speak romanized words/characters as English which seems to be a reasonable option.

COLORS

You can customize your own colors by specify them in the form of 0xFFFFFF in the ~/.bard_config file. It is best to run bard and quit it to get a basic file then change the various color specifications to what you want. There are only a very few builtin (black. white, red, blue and green), but you can specify and red green blue hex values. e.g. if you want the main text window background color to be antiquewhite change the line

-text_background_color "white"

to

-text_background_color "0xcdc0b0"

HISTORY

0.11 August 2014

 harfbuzz/cairo font layout (optional)
 Non-latin language support (Hindi, Chinese, Japanese ...) 
 added font selection sub-menu
 ISSUES: 
 - flite 2.0 voices are slow to load -- they run fine but can take
   5-10 seconds to load from slow devices like sd card
 - It doesn't automatically select the font, if you load a Chinese book
   you need to then use the font sub menu to select a Chinese font to
   go with it.  It will remember that font for that book in future loads
   but you've got to do that initial selection yourself.
   

0.10 July 2014

 gcw-zero support (which only has game console buttons)
 much better (x)html support so it can properly interpret multiple tags
 

0.9 Dec 2013

 menu window (for machines that don't have keyboards)
 voice select, voice name saved with recent files
 "game" controller support (but really for OpenPandora key bindings)
 Open Pandora .pnd support
 

x.x Nov 17 2013 LM

 changes to build on Windows with mingw and msys, handle relative image 
 locations with ../ in path, handle < > and better support for &
 add support for plus on US keyboards (SDLK_Equals plus shift).
 

0.8 ??? (never released)

 (x)html fixes/support
 

0.7 Mar 8th 2012

 cursor hiding, epub (generic tokenstreams), some xhtml highlighting
 paragraph processing improved, bug fixes, epub images,
 fixed smooth scrolling, better audio streaming.
 

0.6 Jan 29th 2012

 page up (ish), keyboard rationalization
 discover screen size (works on n900), screen blank
 bug fixes, externally specified colors, smooth scroll
 

0.5 Jan 22nd 2012 (first release to nanonote list)

 info page: volume, position, speed, battery and time working
 make ipk, logo
 

0.4 Jan 21st 2012

 imported into CVS, paging forward and back (with arrow keys and speech), 
 recent files page, general info page (%pos, volume, speed -- well almost)
 .bard_config, make install, use installed fonts rather than include one
 

0.3 Jan 14th 2012

 SDL audio stable and now default.  Help window.  Tokens on screen can 
 be traversed with arrow keys, and highlighted.  File selection
 works (with dirent and highlighting).  Improved configuration, added
 COPYING and README, included free ttf font.  Technically functional
 

0.2 Jan 7th 2012

 display text (good ttf), speaks, auto pages forward
 support SDL and flite_direct audio.  
 Runs on ben, yentna, leith and awbt60
 

0.1 Jan 4th 2012

 displays loaded text, pages forward, can change font size
 runs on desktop and Ben Nanonote

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to LM for giving a whole set of fixes, and getting me to add some new features

The Bard port to OpenPandora was encouraged by the Alive and Kicking Coding Competition 2013/2014.

FUTURE GOALS

We want this to be a platform for new (fast) high quality synthesis voices in Flite and are working on getting them fast enough to be practical on 336MHz processors. We also want to support more ebook formats. Specific features already on the list are:

Other ebook formats: prc, rtf, pdf
More complete support for epub, (x)html
Search/indexing
Chapter Navigation (when chapters can be found in epub files)
Support for more platforms (e.g. Android)
(Cleaner) Support for cross compilation
SDL 2 support
Automatic font selection within books

But please recommend other features you'd like to see.