DECtalk: Various issues related to less common characters

[ScratchFakemon]

When messing around with the new DECtalk extension, I noticed some oddities regarding characters less common in English.

I understand that the extension specifies that it is meant to only be used for English, but using certain characters shouldn't fully crash the tab.

Here, you can find a sample project and video demonstrating these issues. I haven't had the chance to test every possible scenario, so there could be more issues I haven't discovered yet. I'm not an expert on text to speech, but I might eventually try to look into the issues further and work on a fix.

[NishiOwO]

it should not crash tab, that is probably some browser bug...
but dectalk has been known to have a bug that it does not work well with unicode, i'll try to apply a patch later...

[GarboMuffin]

In the project in the issue, it does very much get stuck in an infinite loop on const tts = speak(str); which effectively crashes the tab. At least, any unsaved changes are hopelessly gone now

[NishiOwO]

probably a bug in dectalk itself

[GarboMuffin]

yes, certainly

[NishiOwO]

can you update dectalk.js to latest one at https://github.com/dectalk/tw-dectalk/blob/master/dectalk.js ? the only change i made here is commit hash thing for dtc.js

[GarboMuffin]

with that it throws an error instead of getting in an infinite loop, so maybe that's a bit better. what did you change?

it might be better if we just strip non-ASCII from the input before even sending it into dectalk

[NishiOwO]

i just remove 0x80-0x82 when inside TextToSpeechStart
they're used as some kind of control char in dectalk

[NishiOwO]

it might be better if we just strip non-ASCII from the input before even sending it into dectalk

it is safe to pass dectalk latin1 characters, so maybe do like
.replace(/[^\x00-\xff]+/g, "")

[NishiOwO]

can you update dectalk.js again? i am removing non-ascii characters now

[GarboMuffin]

where is the code that compiles to dtc.js?

[NishiOwO]

https://github.com/dectalk/dectalkmini
and dtc.c in the tw-dectalk repo

[GarboMuffin]

Thanks