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5.2 Quick Installation ¶

Here are the quick installation instructions. See the next section for detailed installation instructions.

Packages for Linux distributions such as Debian typically become available on the WWW a few weeks or months after a new version is released. The instructions below are for building and installing Emacspeak from the source distribution. If you install one of the prepackaged distributions, use the install instructions that come with that package.

• Obtain the source code — either by downloading the tar.bz2 file for the latest release — or by cloning the git repository.

  git clone https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak
  

• Change to the emacspeak directory.
• Type ‘make config’ to configure the sources.
• Type ‘make’ to compile the files.
• Next, decide which text-to-speech engine you will be using, and proceed to install that engine. Your choices are:
  • Open Source ESpeak on Linux. Install the ESpeak packages for your system, then compile the Emacspeak ESpeak server by doing:

    cd servers/native-espeak
    make
    

  • ViaVoice Outloud (AKA Eloquent). You need to purchase this engine from the voxin site — note that the Vocalizer voices available from that site are not supported. That purchase will give you install-ready packages for installing the speech engine as well as Emacspeak. See https://voxin.oralux.net/rss.xml for the latest packages, and https://voxin.oralux.net for the main Voxin Web site.
  • On the Mac, you can use the builtin Mac TTS engine — emacspeak comes with a speech server for that TTS engine written in swift.
• Having installed and configured the TTS engine of your choice, and having built the associated speech server, set Emacspeak up to use that engine by setting environment variable DTK_PROGRAM. If using bash as your shell, add the line

  export DTK_PROGRAM=<engine-name>
  

  to your .bash_profile.

  As an example, to use ESpeak, add

  export DTK_PROGRAM=espeak
  

• Run it by adding the line

  (load-file "<emacspeak-dir>/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")
  

  to the top of your .emacs file.

  In the above, <emacspeak-dir> refers to the directory where you unpacked the sources.

See the next section for details on building and testing the speech server.