festival speech engine now free -- integrated TTS project switched to it

[Mark Gray <markgray iago nac net>]

Uh duh, while I wasn't paying attention festival was made Free for all
uses (Dec '99).  Since it is being well maintained by experts, already
supports SABLE input (a SGML/XML based markup language for TTS), I am
switching my (optional) integrated text to speech project to use it
instead of rsynth (which has been abandoned for years now.)

If someone who already knows the gnome/gtk/gdk internals better than I
would either say "It's been done!", or "You're a very silly man, now
go away" <copyright><holder>Monty Python</holder></copyright>, I
will gladly move on and look for another project to allow me to give
back to the Free software community.

Basically I intend to hack gdk to feed text it causes to be displayed
to a server process which will cache and feed this text, when
appropriate, to the text to speech engine.  I suppose a lot of you are
sentenced to a cubicle world, and consider this to be an unwanted
annoyance, or think that a console application would be more suitable,
but let me assure you, having seen the M$ platform product JAWS
($850!) in action --- it is really quite effective and not at all
distracting.  When a user moves her mouse across the desktop and help
balloons pop up, they are read aloud as is regularly displayed text ---
keystrokes are read aloud, and words once they are completed.

So will someone talk me out of this, or should I just get on with it
and report back when it is all done?