Hello Pranil and others,

You may criticise this idea for being long winded, but it actually
involves fewer words than speaking the brackets.  For example
the two words "Sum" and "Mus" replace four words: "left bracket"
and "right bracket".

And if one had to be able to distinguish different types of bracket,
as was proposed on this list, we might be replacing six words:
"left round bracket" and "right round bracket".

So my proposal is economical on words.

It is also economical to implement.  You could easily modify a text
reader or screen reader to read maths like this.  Alternatively one
could use a preprocessor to convert brackets and maths symbols into words,
which would be spoken directly by an existing synthesiser as normal English.
BTW, preprocessing is a technique used for obtaining better speech
from ordinary text.

If there is enough interest in this idea, we ought to get a full
specification agreed and a preprocessor written.  We also need to
define an XML tag to delineate mathematics notation within an HTML
document.  Could we use <maths> .. </maths> for example?

Cheers from Chiswick,

John
--
In message  <[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask] writes:

>Hi Jim,
>
>One of the main problems is bracketing.  This problem occurs in
>computer languages.  One solution is to use key words at beginning
>and end of bracketed text.  For example in one language, the word at
>the beginning is reversed at the end, thus if.. fi.
>
>For maths we could have some simple word brackets:
>        Sum             Mus
>        Prod            Dorp
>        Top             Pot
>        Bottom          Mottob
>        Frac            Carf
>and so on.
>
>These could supplement the normal rounded brackets.  When spoken
>by a text-to-speech system, rounded brackets would generally
>be ignored.  (Some TTS systems might slightly lower and speed up
>the voice for parenthetic text.)
>
>There would also need to be conventions on speaking the signs.
>The forward slash would be read as "over", single star as "times",
>double star as "to the power", hat symbol as "and", the letter v as
>"or", period as "point", the combination of plus and minus as
>"plus or minus", etc.
>
>Example:
>        x = Top ( Sum (A+B-C) Mus ** Frac (-1/3) Carf ) Pot /
>        Bottom ( Prod (D*E*F) Dorf +4 ) Mottob
>
>The speech could be improved by comma and semicolon punctuation:
>
>        x = Top ( Sum (A+B-C) Mus, ** Frac (-1/3) Carf, ) Pot; /
>        Bottom ( Prod (D*E*F) Dorf, +4 ) Mottob.
>
>This is just an idea which would put minimal requirements on the
>text-to-speech system, hence low cost.
>
>Cheers,
>
>John

--
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John Nissen, Cloudworld Ltd., Chiswick, London
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