Please address any comments, questions, suggestions or bug reports to jsaccente@eworld.com



Yak is shareware.  If you decide to keep Yak, please send your $10 shareware fee to:



		John M. Saccente

		5403 Mount Royal Circle

		Houston, Texas 77069



  Thank you!!





What is Yak??



	Yak is my first Newton app which I created in order to aquaint myself with Newton development, the NTK environment and Newtonscript.  It is a simple little text-to-speech engine which exists as a sort of "extension" - it does nothing by itself but its functions are called by outside applications.  This means that you can write your own programs to take advantage of Yak's (somewhat peculiar) vocal stylings...even from NS BASIC!  All of the dirty details are included in the Yak programming folder, as well as a very simple NTK package with a demo app to show you how it's done.



	The Yak software included here consists of three main parts: (1) Yak 1.0 package  (2)  Yak "Control Panel"  (3)  A little Yak-applet, "NoteYak," which works with the Newton's internal "Notes" application to read stuff outloud to any hapless individual in earshot.  Simply install all three packages with any ol' package downloader just like usual.



Yak Control Panel



	Tapping on the Yak Control Panel icon in the extras drawer will call up, astonishingly enough, the Yak control panel.  From here you may select from one of three distinct voices - male (best) female (kinda sucks, sorry) newt reaper (electro-spooky) plus one low-budget 5 kHz version of the male voice, just in case you find yourself having heap space trauma.  It sounds a bit fuzzy, but will save you lots of memory.

	When Yak has trouble pronouncing a word (which will happen with alarming frequency) you can add that word to Yak's custom dictionary and teach Yak how the word is to be properly pronounced.   To add a word, simply hit the add button, write the word in the provided slip, hit the accept button, then tap out the phonetic spelling of the word on the great big keypad provided.  Each key has a phonetic symbol and a word with the appropriate sound underlined to guide you along...if it seems difficult to put a word together at first, keep trying.  With a little practice it becomes effortless.  The symbols are collected and displayed for reference in the little window at the bottom of the screen.  The bottom right of the keypad has three "action" keys.  The left arrow is a delete key, the "test" key will speak out what you've built so far, and the "enter" key will accept and enter the definition to the dictionary.  The cancel button aborts.

	Once you've added a word (or many words) to the dictionary, it will appear listed alphabetically in the dictionary window.  To edit a word already in the dictionary, tap the word then hit the edit button.  Likewise, tapping a word and hitting the remove button will erase the highlighted word from the dictionary.  When you've added more entries than can fit in the window, the arrow buttons will let you scroll up and down through the list.  (NOTE: holding the scroll arrows down results in continuous scrolling, but this scrolling is NOT visible until you release the arrow!  In other words, if you've got a great big list of words and you hold the down arrow for a few seconds, nothing will appear to happen, but when you release the button, you'll find yourself at the bottom of the list...)



NoteYak applet



	The little applet you will use to get Yak talking is NoteYak.  Tapping on the icon in the extras drawer will create a little draggable windoid in the upper left hand corner of the screen.   Actually, the lower right hand corner is probably the best place for it .. But anyway, put it where ever you like by dragging it around by the grey "handle" on the left.  There are two buttons, whose functions should be pretty obvious.  The "yakface" button will read (if there is one) the current note in the notepad.  The clock button will speak the current time.  Warning: Yak will not shut up until it has read the whole note!  Don't try speaking a really long note unless you 1) have lots of patience or 2) are ready to hit the reset button if you lose your patience.  (hitting the reset button will not affect the dictionary or voice preference data, by the way)  Also worth noting, NoteYak reads the data in the note soup in the order in which it is found there - not necessarily the order in which it appears on the screen!  Sometimes this can have strange results.  For example: write a sentence, then write another one above it on the screen.  Then speak it.  The bottom one goes first, the top one second.

	The NoteYak app has no close box, as you'll notice.  It is only openable and closable by tapping and re-tapping on the icon in the extras drawer.  If it magically disappears from time to time,  just open it back up from the extras drawer again.  I don't know where it goes, but sometimes it goes!

	



	Have fun!



Yak, the Yak control panel, NoteYak and all of the accompanying files in the Yak folder are Copyright )1995 John M. Saccente.  You may freely distribute the Yak folder to any online service, BBS, FTP site, shareware compilation, etc... so long as the folder and all of its contents remain complete, intact and unaltered in any way.  If in the rare case that you should happen to write a Yak-savvy application and wish to distribute any part of the Yak software along with your own, you must include the entire Yak folder and all of this stuff along with it.



Please address any comments, questions, suggestions or bug reports to jsaccente@eworld.com