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Speak a text file to AIFF
Authored by: Eravau on Dec 19, '02 05:12:28PM
Actually, it looks like I figured that out for nothing...


If you looke at one of Apple's AppleScript pages it has a couple of nice scripts with even more extensive abilities than the hint or mine.


One thing I would like to add, though... If you want a web page automatically saved to a text file (via AppleScript) for processing with one of these scripts, the best alternative I've found is using a do shell script command and running links (text-based web browser) with the -dump flag. For example:


do shell script "/sw/bin/links
-dump http://www.macosxhints.com/
> ~/Desktop/MacOSXHints"


(Note: the 3 bold lines above should be one line, but are broken for readability. Just rejoin them with a space at the end of each line above. This requires that you have the links web browser installed...which you can do with fink.)


...will dump a text-rendered version of the front page of this web site to a file on your desktop. You could then open the file manually with the script above...or just add it to the script and have it automatically go through all of the pages you want turned into audio files and download, open, and speak to file for each one.


You could probably even AppleScript iTunes to encode it to mp3 for you and sync it to your iPod so that you can have your favorite web pages read to you on the go. According to iTune's AppleScript dictionary, there are convert and update commands to do just these things.


Since I don't have an iPod, I didn't have enough motivation to work out all the syntax and write the script, but if somebody wants to give me an iPod for Christmas, I think I could work up enough energy to do that. = )


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