[Edbrowse-dev] High Unicodes

[Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net>]

This is where speech adapters and edbrowse intersect,
thus posted to both groups.
Twitter, and I'm sure other social media,
make it easy for people to embed emoticons in their messages.
These are rendered by edbrowse, then spoken by speech software.
An example is 😀 for a grinning face.
So, what should we do about this?
Right now both my worlds have a partial solution.
Edbrowse translates a few common high unicodes into words,
but of course this only happens when browsing html, and the resulting words are
hard coded English.
My jupiter speech has the right solution:
set pronunciations in your config file.
Other speech adapters do this as well.
The line in my config file looks like this.

x1f600 grin

That's all you need.

I think edbrowse shouldn't be doing this at all.
Just turn the &#codes into unicode, then utf8, then
to the screen, and let speech software say the symbols as you wish,
in your language.
And this would work for all files everywhere, not just html that edbrowse browses.
But, some have said that some speech adapters aren't this flexible,
and wouldn't it be nice if edbrowse would continue to perform
some of these translations, so at least surfing the web would work properly.
Well maybe, I'm not sure, but if we retain this functionality
it should probably be configurable, not hard coded.

Karl Dahlke