the myths about stardict-3.0.1's text-to-speech feature
stardict-3 is now available via gentoo-china overlay . (I wish I could pass ebuild quiz soon and become stardict's maintainer in gentoo...) stardict-3 has got tts feature. It could use festival or espeak to play an arbitrary sequence of characters. There are two ways to use this feature. One way is via tts plugin, one for each tts engine. In fact, tts plugin does more than that - it could set the voice of its corresponding tts engine as well. The other way is to specify the command to play yourself, and there are two options which you can choose from, "echo %s | festival --tts" and "espeak %s". My experience is the first way has priority over the latter one. My suggestion is to use the latter one. Because tts plugin's functionality is redundant. You can choose tts engine's voices anyway. And you can use tts engine without them. Moreover, the festival plugin will segfault the program[1]. So, IMHO, the tts plugins are dispensable. So in my stardict-3.0.1-r