Question: I am confused about the use of the speech "viewer" and the
          Sound Blaster Texto'LE program in WinPack V6.3!
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Answer:   WinPack V6.3 has support for a special message "viewer" which
          can be used to speak messages. An example speech viewer was
          supplied with the V6.3 update, and this example viewer made
          use of the Sound Blaster Texto'LE program.

          The use of a speech "viewer" was an idea put into WinPack as
          an area for possible experimentation. Apart from being a
          novelty, with a little bit of development I'm sure it could
          have some practical uses.

          The actual speech "viewer" is SPKVIEW.EXE. As distributed with
          the WinPack V6.3 update, that calls Texto'LE, but it was never
          my intention that SPKVIEW could only be used with Texto'LE.
          The idea was that alternative text to speech programs could be
          patched in by altering SPKVIEW.INI. Also, I hope that other
          people might produce better speech "viewers" than SPKVIEW.

          The structure of SPKVIEW.INI is described in SPKVIEW.TXT.
          Please note that there is an error in that file - the key to
          activate the speech viewer is Ctrl_T, not Ctrl_S.

          As regards the controversy which has occurred on the UK packet
          network about what Sound Blaster packages include Texto'LE,
          all I can say is that I have an SB16 "Plug and Play" card.
          With that I received a CD labelled "Sound Blaster CD", and one
          of the utilities on that CD was Texto'LE.


Roger Barker, G4IDE
December 1997