[Kde-accessibility] SSML, KTTSD, kpdf, KSayIt, KOffice, khtml integration

[Gary Cramblitt]

John Tapsel (JohnFlux) and I were chatting today about enhancing KTTS to 
support conversion of HTML to SSML.  He offered a concept I'd like all 
involved to be aware of and consider.

KOffice currently has filters.  A KOffice filter consists of a .desktop file 
referencing a conversion library and the following, for example, to convert 
HTML to KWord format

X-KDE-Export=application/x-kword
X-KDE-Import=text/html

Given a set of such filters, converting a file is a matter of calling 
kofiltermanager with an input file and desired output format.  It returns a 
stream.  (John intends to modify this so that a stream can be used as input 
as well.)  The kofiltermanager determines the shortest path to do the 
conversion.  For example, given the following set of available filters

MsWord->KWord
OASIS->XHTML
KWord->OASIS
XHTML->OASIS

kofiltermanger converts a MsWord doc to XHTML via the following sequence

MsWord->KWord->OASIS->XHTML

(Note: I probably have the exact available filters wrong, but hopefully, you 
get the idea.)

Imagine we wrote some additional filters, namely

XHTML->SSML
PDF->XHTML
DocBook->XHTML (i.e, meinproc)

Then it would be possible to convert any supported input format to SSML for 
speech output (or any of the other supported output formats, for that 
matter).

At the moment, KoFilters are part of the KOffice module, but John proposes to 
move them to kdelibs.  In addition, John is working on a khtml clipboard 
enhancement that permits selecting text from webpages, preserving the markup, 
guaranteeing xhtml format,  and converting via KoFilters.

I think this concept makes a lot of sense.  Simply make sure there's a filter 
to convert to your app's format from one of the other major formats and your 
app automatically supports any of the filter input formats.  Write a filter 
to convert your app's format to one of the major formats  and other apps can 
now support your app's format.  Of course, one loses a certain amount of 
information with each conversion step.

Thoughts?

-- 
Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
KDE Text-to-Speech Maintainer
http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php