Options

Most aspects of the operation can be customized by changing options. This can be enforced by TTSCP commands, in configuration files and on the command line. Basically, an option is an option name/option value pair. There are a few possible option types: number, string, yes/no, character, and a few enumerated types. Almost all individual options are documented in . If you strongly suspect this section of documentation to be out-of date, the reliable list of all built-in long options can be found in src/options.lst. (See approximately line 320 and below. Every line represents at most one option for every option class as explained below. The option name is quoted; its semantics is usually explained following the option.) You can also list the option names and types using eposd -H. Option Classes

There are four classes of options: static options, global options, language options and voice options. For instance, switching a voice in fact means switching to another set of voice options, while the language options, global options and static options stay the same. Every voice is language specific (implies a specific language). That's why switching the language automatically switches the voice to the voice defined as default or the last active one for this particular language. (It is of course possible to use the same configuration file to setup a similarly sounding voice for every language if desired.) It is also important to distinguish between a voice and an inventory. An The difference between global and static options is subtler and not that important for most users. All voice specific, language specific and also global options are implemented as user specific, that is, each TTSCP control connection may assign a different value to them at the same time. For some options however, which are of even more global impact, this may make little sense. These are termed static. Assigning a value to a static option causes the value to change even for other concurrent users. Whenever an option name is given, it is first understood as a voice option (of the current voice); if there is no such voice option, the name is treated as a language option, then as a global/static option. To override this order, you can prefix an option with "S:", "C:", "L:" or "V:". This will restrict the search to static, global, language or voice options, respectively. (This is automatically done with configuration files, because every configuration file describes either a language or a voice, or it is unrelated to the current language and voice altogether.) Option Types

Each option has an associated type, which is indicated with each option in the documentation. Mostly these are traditional types like booleans, strings, and non-negative numbers. Others are limited to a fixed choice of values (e.g. "mono" or "stereo"), yet others are limited to a choice of values which depends on other configuration (e.g. on the levels of descriptions, on the available encoding mapping files, or on the current list of language configurations). With all these options it is impossible to set the option to a syntactically impossible value, although it is easy to set the option to a value which makes little sense. Autoconcatenating Options

Several string-typed options (especially the language, voice and soft option lists) have special behavior if they appear multiple times within the configuration (not limited to the configurations files!). In contrast with almost all options which take the last value offered, these special options concatenate all the supplied values and separate them by colons. This makes sense, as all these option values are syntactically colon separated lists of strings. If you need to set an autoconcatenating option to a different value, you need first to reset it first by supplying an empty string to it. This does set it to the empty string as opposed to concatenating a colon and an empty string to the previous value. Configuration Files

Whenever the program starts up, it reads a number of configuration files, setting up the initial (default) values of the options. These are located under /usr/local/share/epos (unless overidden at configure/compile time or with the --base_dir option on the command line). By convention, configuration file names have the ".ini" suffix. (On a Windows NT-like operating system, you can use the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Epos\Setup registry key to set the value of Path to a path leading to the configuration files. This value can still be overridden by the command line.) Unless overridden, three files in /usr/local/share/epos/cfg will be processed to setup the global configuration: fixed.ini, epos.ini and either ansi.ini or rtf.ini (depending on the preferred output format if colored output is turned on -- either ANSI escape sequences or RTF are supported at the moment; other markup formats can be added easily). By convention, fixed.ini contains the standard global and static configuration values used by a given installation and rarely or never changes, while epos.ini contains less permanent parameters and temporary values. The global parameters include a list of languages, or language configurations which will be parsed when the global configuration is set up. Every language .ini file in turn contains a list of voices to be configured for this particular language. Language configuration files are located under /usr/local/share/epos/lng/*/*.ini, voice configuration files under /usr/local/share/epos/inv/*/*.ini, where * represents any string listed in the list of languages (or voices for a language). Go see the real files under /usr/local/share/epos/cfg/*.ini for an example. Configuration File Format Overview

A configuration file contains one option per line (empty lines are ignored). Each option is a name-value pair, separated with whitespace. A string value may be (and sometimes must be, e.g. if it begins with whitespace) enclosed in double quotes. Every configuration file is associated with a certain option set, that is, it contains either just global options, or options related to some language or voice. (In the latter two cases, the name option identifies the language or voice properly.) Character Encoding

Sometimes it is not convenient or possible to encode all configuration files in the same character encoding. For example, a character encoding may be language dependent. But it is even possible for different lines of the same file to use different encodings. You can switch character encodings for the same file using the @charset directive. Charset name must be specified as a parameter and it must be enclosed in parentheses. Epos attempts to load the corresponding unicode character mapping file and immediately switches the charset number for the current file. Please note two differences from the @include directive), whereas the option doesn't affect it at all, but it affects all subsequent files (e.g. for the given language), such as the rules file. You have the following choice of charsets: arbitrary 8-bit encodings (provided a Unicode mapping file is present in cfg/mappings), utf-8, sampa-std (standard SAMPA) and sampa-alt-NAME where NAME is a pre-configured SAMPA alternate. Escaping Special Characters

It is possible to enter some special characters using escape sequences, such as "\ " for a space, "\n" for a newline, or "\˜" for "..." or "dots" (treated as a single character in Epos). The available escape sequences are listed in .
Escape sequences used in configuration files
(If you suspect this table to be out-of-date, you can consult the token_esc and value_esc constants in option.lst, or the table in parser.h.) ASCII codes in parentheses are ASCII codes used for different purposes by Epos. Comments and the @include Directive

A configuration file usually contains various comments. A comment can start on any line with a semicolon or hash mark and lasts to the end of line. The semicolon (or hash mark) must be located at the beginning of line or just after some whitespace. Semicolons in the middle of a word don't start a comment. If a line begins with @include (possibly preceded by whitespace), it is treated as the include directive. The format of the line should be @include "filename" and it will cause the contents of the filename file to be inserted at this place of the main .ini file. These includes can be nested to any depth up to the value of the Other Directives

Two more directives, @warn and @error with obvious semantics are available for diagnostic purposes. Command Line

Command line option values can be passed to Epos at server startup, or to the Input Text

Technically speaking, this subsection doesn't really concern the options, but it is nevertheless included. The main purpose of the Long Options

The long options are also available through the say-epos --language german --pausing "Wie geht es?" --show_segments This sets the default language to German, enables pausing after each transformation rule is applied to the text (sets the eposd -H of the main program (not the client stub, sorry). The semantics of nearly all individual long options is described . For turning long boolean options off, it is possible to give their name with three dashes. Therefore, say-epos ---show_transcript "Say this, do not show the transcription" is equivalent to say-epos --show_transcript off "Say this, do not show the transcription" Refer to the section for documentation on available long options. Language and Voice Switching

Two pseudo-options say-epos Something. --init_f 80 --voice vichova doesn't do the expected thing, i.e. use the voice named "vichova" as modified by setting the neutral pitch for this command to 80. Instead, the neutral pitch is set for the default voice, and then the voice is switched to the specified one. To get the intended behavior, reorder the command line: say-epos Something. --voice vichova --init_f 80 Short Options

The most frequently used options and occasionally even collections of options and/or other stuff are given a shortcut, called a short option. A short option is a single letter preceded by a single dash. Usual conventions for merging short options into a single string are available, and the example above may thus be abbreviated as say-epos --language german -p "Wie geht es?" -d or even say-epos --language german -pd "Wie geht es?" (There is no short option for --language.) The short options are interpreted directly by the eposd --help, or eposd -h/. A list of (the most of) short options understood by the say-epos -h. Such list however includes undocumented options which may disappear in the next releases. Please keep in mind that the say-epos utility is only an example of a TTSCP client and not a full-fledged controlling interface to Epos. Server Short Options

-f Do not fork at startup. Same as -h Show a summary of available short options -p Same as -v Show Epos version. -D Turn on debugging output. Multiple -H In addition to a summary of short options, show also a list of all available long options. Client Short Options

-k Shut down the server. -l List all available languages and available voices for the current language. -m Write the waveform to a file (said.vox in the client's current directory) instead of writing it to the local sound card; the output doesn't include any header and is in the mu law format. -o Write the waveform to the standard output. In this case, no transcription is performed. -u Turn on utterance chunking. This option has unintuitive consequences when combined with -w Write the waveform to a file (said.wav in the client's directory) instead of writing it to the local sound card. Setting Options in TTSCP

See the for general overview of TTSCP and the restr.ini File

Setting options in TTSCP can be a security problem, as some options can cause the server to access unrelated files. It is therefore strongly recommended not to run the Epos daemon with superuser privileges, but sometimes a more fine-grained access control mechanism is needed. It is authentication and limiting access to specified options for some or all users. By default, all settable parameters can be changed by any outside connection (this doesn't affect the value in use for any other connection in any way). You can control this privilege by restricting it in cfg/restr.ini. Every line of that file is in the form option_name access_rights The access rights must be in lowercase and must not contain spaces. They are a sequence of if no if no if a following $, they grant the respective rights to any authenticated user. following #, they grant the respective rights to the root only. r | read only@ w | write only@ rw | no restriction@ #w$r | root can write, authenticated users can read@ r#w | anyone can read, root can also write@ #rw | root can read/write@
Examples of option access rights
Unknown parameters are considered just not to have been implemented in this particular version of Epos and are not reported. Parameters not mentioned in restr.ini are allowed unlimited access by any connection. Note that the location of this file can be changed at the command line (with Semipermanent Personal Preferences

If many users with different needs and aesthetic feelings share the same Epos daemon installation, they may choose to place the appropriate TTSCP commands into a file and to point the TTSCP_USER environment variable to this file. The contents of that file will be transmitted by the client to set up the working environment at the beginning of every session. An example: set language czech set voice kadlec set init_f 90 set init_i 110 set language slovak This example will adjust the preferred pitch and volume for a certain Czech voice; it will also set the default language to Slovak. See the for more info.

Under UNIX, Epos reinitializes itself upon a hangup signal (SIGHUP). Existing TTSCP connections are terminated and configuration is reloaded. Soft Options

Most options (discussed until this point) have built-in meanings and semantics; for most uses this is sufficient and necessary. However, the user may also decide to define additional options to be provided by a language to its voices. This mechanism is called soft options; soft options are always voice options and are described at the language level (that is, the name, type and default value is supplied with the language, but individual voices may choose to specify a value for the option). The soft options are described by the language option soft_options. It is an autoconcatenating list of colon separated descriptions of individual soft options; every item is of the format name[(type)][=default], where name is an arbitrary option name, type is b (meaning boolean; other possibilities might include s, n, c for strings, integers and characters, respectively, but these don't seem to be useful. The default is the default value to be used if the option is left unspecified by a voice. It should be chosen as a backward compatible value for a new option if applicable. The type and/or the default may be left unspecified. The default type is boolean, the default default is an empty string. An example: soft_options "colloquial=false" soft_options "segment_listing_file(s)=traditnl.dph" This example defines two options, a boolean colloquial and a string segment_listing_file. The sets of soft options for individual languages are independent and never clash with each other. However, built-in option names may not be used as soft option names. Please note the difference between rule file macros and soft options: rule file macros are useful for arbitrary string replacement and they serve well for concentrating every single idea to a single place at the startup time. Soft options, on the other hand, are limited to conditioning rules, but can change value later just as any other option without the need to recompile the rules. Indeed, multiple users may use the same rules with different values of the same soft option simultaneously. Level of Description Dependent Options

Some options, especially pertaining to parsing the input and formatting the output, are set separately for every layer of the , so that each of them is actually an array of options, indexed using the commercial at character (@) followed by a layer name. For example, perm@colon ":," defines the permissible colon terminators. Since the TSR layer names are themselves defined by the perm r For these and other reasons, changing the Selected Individual Options

Most individual options will be described in this section. The rest are either straightforward or rarely useful. A complete list of options can be obtained through src/options.lst. The type and the semantic class of the argument is indicated for all individual options except for truth value ( Overall Options

Some options control overall preferences, strategies and assumptions to be used by Epos. Most of them are global booleans. They are usually of technical nature and the output produced by Epos should not change with these options changed, but they can be useful in some special configurations. They also get added to resolve some simple software engineering dilemmata. The options in this subsection are not unless specified otherwise. --comma This is the delimiter for Epos-generated lists, especially in TTSCP; an arbitrary string is allowed. Do not change. --default_char The character to replace any unknown characters in the input text. See also the --end_of_file The character to terminate the input text. This defaults to the escape character. The length of the input text is usually defined externally (by the --asyncing Turn on to enable asynchronous close() processing. Usable only on unices; uses fork to delegate the synchronous close() to a child. This option can be useful for eliminating communication delays when closing a sound card file descriptor, but it can cause subsequent references to the same device fail, because the child still hasn't released the device. The option has no meaning on non-UNIX systems, where the close() is always synchronous. --forking Turn on to allow forking and fully detaching the Epos daemon. Usable only on unices. If off, some debugging information will be written to --init_time If set to a non-zero value under a UNIX, the parent process will wait for at most --markup_language The parameter is either "ansi", "rtf" or "none". This parameter is only effective in fixed.ini or on the command line. Depending on its value, the --pend_max The maximum number of subtasks waiting in an input queue for a single agent. If this limit is reached, the preceding agent stops processing further input until only --pend_min The minimum desired number of subtasks waiting in an input queue for a single agent. If the queue length decrements to this limit and the preceding agent has enough input to process, it resumes operation. This limit should be set roughly to half the --memory_low Turn on if you're very low on memory. This mode sacrifices speed for a little bit of saved memory. Basically, turning this on caused various dictionaries to be discarded whenever the rule which has used them has been applied and reloaded the next time it is needed. Likewise, cached files are released upon the last --paranoid With this option on, Epos will tend to detect more errors in various kinds of input files than without. It will rather try to reject suspicious or formally incorrect inputs, than to do something reasonable with them. Useful for debugging. This option is not static. --pausing With this option on, Epos will pause and wait for a keypress after every rule is applied. Of course, this is incompatible with the --ptr_trusted One of the checks performed when the option is disabled is checking whether some pointers are actually pointers, that is, very big numbers when cast to an integer. This can be useful on some machines, but it is absolutely unportable. It may or may not work with your compiler; enable this option to skip these checks. --relax_input Turn on in real life situations. When off, Epos will quit parsing any text which contains an unknown character (not listed in one of the --show_rule Print each rule before it is applied. This is useful mostly for debugging situations (when a text is parsed in an unexpected way and the user is trying to find out which rule has escaped his attention). This option may not work with all setups.

When Epos is compiled as a TTSCP server, the variability of data formats is controlled by TTSCP rather than by option settings. However, there are some options related to the output formats produced by the monolithic binary (executable). There are also some conventional informative outputs that can be produced by the monolithic and server binaries equally. All options in this subsection are . --show_phones Print the sequence of sounds generated from the text processed. Monolithic binary only. --show_segments Print the sequence of segments generated from the text processed. Monolithic binary only. --show_raw_segs When used in conjunction with the --play_segments Synthesize the waveform and say it through the sound card. Monolithic binary only. --wave_header When dumping the waveform into a file or a TTSCP data connection, put the RIFF wave file header at its beginning. Regardless of this value, the header is never added when writing the waveform to a sound output device (a file descriptor which understands the usual ioctls). TTSCP requires this option be always set to --ulaw Generated waveform uses mu law sample encoding instead of linear encoding. --out_sampling_rate Voice dependent option. May be used to downsample the output by one half. --autofilter If this option is enabled, an appropriate low band filter is used whenever downsampling. This is necessary to avoid phantom sounds in the output. --label_seg Output segment (diphone) labels in the output waveform using the appropriate RIFF WAVE chunks. Print the sequence of segments generated from the text processed just after the --neuronet This is normally on. Turning this off skips the neuronet initialization and makes Epos shutdown if the functionality is requested later. This may be useful with debugging tools like the Electric Fence. --help Print a brief synopsis of short options upon startup. No data processing is performed. --long_help Print a list of long options upon startup. No data processing is performed. --version Print the current version number to Text Output Formatting

You can tailor the conventions for printing out processed text quite a lot. Basically, we're printing out a , so that we can see what level of description does a character belong to. Preserving this information in the output is often very desirable; it can either be done by inserting delimiters such as custom syllable breaks, or by coloring some levels of description. This family of options can result in a quite complex configuration. That's why we provide at least two complete sets of settings in option to switch between them in to the user. The model we use is assigning a few colors consistently to the individual levels of description and marking up the boundaries between units with parentheses, separators or both. The levels of description are in compile time. The . --colored If disabled, all color manipulating options will be ignored. Many configurations will enable this by default, because the escape sequences are rarely usable directly and never indirectly. --normal_color String to switching to the neutral (default) color. Issued at the end of every colored piece of text. --curr_rule_color String to switch to the a . --fatal_color String to switch to the color used for printing out fatal error messages. --header The value is the file name of a file in the directory specified by the --footer The value is the file name of a file in the directory specified by the --begin* The asterisk stands for a @-separated symbolic name of a linguistic description level, such as --close* The asterisk stands for a @-separated symbolic name of a linguistic description level, such as --color* The asterisk stands for a @-separated symbolic name of a linguistic description level, such as --separ* The asterisk stands for a @-separated symbolic name of a linguistic description level, such as --structured Whether the verbose model of displaying the TSR as described above is used. When off, only the text itself is printed and simple spacing is used to delimit units which do not correspond to actual characters. This option is orthogonal to the --postfix If on, the upper level characters (such as punctuation) are printed after the lower level characters (such as letters or sounds) in the phonetic transcription. --prefix If on, the upper level characters (such as punctuation) are printed before the lower level characters (such as letters or sounds) in the phonetic transcription. Disabling both --swallow_underbars Epos uses the low line ( Limits

Most algorithms used in Epos are boundless, avoiding techniques like fixed size arrays or buffers. On the other hand, there are instances when this is inadequate, especially for speed or space considerations. In these cases Epos tries to use growable data structures, so that they perform well up to a certain size limit and then somewhat slower, but still correctly. We call such a limit a unless specified otherwise. --buffer_size Soft limit. The initial buffer size for a wave file. This value is not used, if we already know that we will eventually write this waveform to a sound card device; in this case we use ioctls to find out the size of its hardware buffer to maximize the chance of getting a smooth playback. --ssif_buff_size Soft lmit. The initial buffer size for the SSIF buffer as SSIF is being extracted from TSR. --dev_text_len Sanity check limit. When reading from a device, this is the maximum amount of data which will be read for processing. This is not necessary when reading from a file, because the length of a file can be known in advance. This option is not static. --hash_search Trade-off. Controls how many multipliers are tried out when constructing a perfect hash table, for each table size. The search begins at 1 and continues up to --hashes_full Trade-off. Controls how full should a hash table ideally be. The hash tables used in Epos are actually quite robust performance-wise, so that even values like 1000, that is, ten data items per a hash table slot, result in near-optimal speed. Values somewhere below 100 are the best bet. --max_errors Sanity check limit. If more than --max_nest Sanity check limit. If the nest deeper than this value, Epos quits parsing the file on the assumption the inclusion is cyclic. --max_line_len Hard limit. Maximum line length in a text-oriented input file. Longer lines are truncated. --max_net_cmd Hard limit. Maximum TTSCP command length. TTSCP lines longer than this will be truncated. The protocol requires this value to be at least 80, but a few kilobytes is recommended. --max_rule_weight Sanity check limit. Maximum rule weight in a choice, as well as the maximum rule repeat count. Using very large weights can result in memory exhaustion. Values on the order of 10000 are still perfectly safe. --max_text_size Sanity check limit. Maximum amount of space allowed for growable processing buffers, or for the input text (checked just before parsing). This option is generally used to avoid memory exhaustion. --max_utterance A trigger of a hard limit. If utterance chunking is employed, Epos tries quite hard to shrink every utterance below this limit based on a fixed language independent heuristic. --split_utterance Hard limit. If utterance chunking is employed and Epos completely fails to break an utterance below the --multi_subst Sanity check limit. How may substitutions will be applied to a unit during processing of a --rules_in_block Soft limit. Number of rules used in a block of of rules. --scratch_size Hard limit. Epos uses a temporary internal buffer in a few places. Usually only very few bytes of the buffer are needed, but overflowing it is fatal. It is recommended to provide at least a few hundred bytes, preferably kilobytes, for this buffer. --seg_buff_size Soft limit. Maximum number of segments generated by the diphoniser and synthesized at once. It more segments have to be generated, they are synthesized in chunks of --variables Soft limit. Number of variables used in a set of rules. Language Dependent Configuration

This subsection lists some options defined for each language. Additional language dependent options are certain directory and file names and possibly others. As every voice is associated with a single language (two voices may share a multilingual segment inventory if desired), every voice dependent option is also language dependent. --name This option assigns a name to a newly created language. If there is no name specified, this option defaults to the configuration file name (from the last slash to the nearest dot) the configuration has been loaded from. The name is then used to refer to the language in TTSCP. The language name must begin with an alphabetical character and consist of alphanumerical characters (dashes and underscores are also allowed). --voices Lists initially available voices. The parameter is a colon separated list of voice names. Every voice must have its associated . --soft_options Lists available soft options as described in subsection . This option . --fallback_mode Not used under normal circumstances. Epos initialises its synthesis type dependent specific structures the first time it uses a voice. Should such an initialization fail due to the reason specified by this option, the current voice will be switched to the voice specified by the option and the initialisation will be retried. The 0 | fallbacks are disabled @ 1 | fallbacks occur on all 4xx class errors @ 4 | fallbacks occur with uninstalled voices (445) and network errors (47x)@ 7 | fallbacks occur with network errors (47x)@ Voice Dependent Configuration

--name This option assigns a name to a newly created voice. If there is no name specified, this option defaults to the configuration file name (from the last slash to the nearest dot) the configuration has been loaded from. The name is then used to refer to the voice in TTSCP. The voice name must begin with an alphabetical character and consist of alphanumerical characters (dashes and underscores are also allowed). --type The parameter, the speech synthesis type, is one of the following: none | voice is mute @ internet | voice uses a remote speech synthesizer using TCP/IP@ lpc-int | voice uses an LPC synthesizer (integer based)@ lpc-float | voice uses an LPC synthesizer (floating point based)@ lpc-vq | voice uses an LPC synthesizer (vector quantified)@ tdp | voice uses a time domain synthesizer@ mbrola | voice uses an external MBROLA synthesizer@
This option may influence other voice dependent options quite significantly, as some of them are speech synthesis type dependent. --location If this speech synthesis is of the . --deadlock_timeout The value is a time interval in seconds. This option is meaningless for voices of type other then --n_segs The total number of segments withing the segment inventory. --models The value is a file name. The file contains the segment inventory proper. Its format is speech synthesis type dependent. --counts The value is a file name. The file contains the lengths of individual segments in this segment inventory. --dpt_file The value is a file name. The file contains the symbolic segment names for user output; each consists of exactly three characters on a line (indented with spaces from the left if necessary). No blank lines nor comments are allowed. This file usually comes with a diphone inventory. --codebook The value is a file name. The file contains the code book for the vector quantified LPC speech synthesis ( --snl_file The value is a file name. The file contains phone boundary information for individual segments in this segment inventory. Each line of the file contains three space-separated items: segment number, relative position within the segment (valued from 1 to 1024, e.g. 512 is the middle of the segment) and the character (phone representation) which is to be associated with the position. Lines not conforming to this specification are ignored. Currently, at most one label may be indicated for one segment, but it would be easy to get rid of this limit (at a cost of a few extra processor instructions). See also . --init_f The auditory neutral integer value for the fundamental frequency. The typical value is 100. --init_i The auditory neutral integer value for the volume. The typical value is 100. --init_t The auditory neutral integer value for the prosodic duration of segments. The typical value is 100. Of course, it is segment length relative (some segments are longer than others), just as the --channel The parameter, the output channel type, is one of the following: mono | mono output signal @ left | stereo output signal, right channel is mute@ right | stereo output signal, left channel is mute@ both | stereo output signal, two identical channels@
This option may be used to simulate a dialogue by assigning different output channels to different speakers. --inv_sampling_rate The sampling rate this segment inventory has been recorded at. The algorithms we use also imply that we use the same frequency for the synthesis. --sample_size Number of bits per sample. If some kind of a stereo output is turned on, this option sets the number of bits per channel. Again, this is related to the quality of recording of the segment inventory. We currently only support 8 and 16 bits. --sampa_alternate For MBROLA voices, you can indicate non-standard SAMPA variants here; the value of Prosody Generation

The options in this subsection control how the resulting per segment prosodic information is assembled from the prosodic adjustments done to the structural units by the rules. It actually controls the interpretation of those adjustments themselves. --pros_weight* The asterisk stands for a @-separated symbolic name of a linguistic description level, such as --pros_eff_multiply_* The asterisk stands for a single letter, for more information and examples. --pros_neutral_* The asterisk stands for a single letter, File Naming

In Epos, most of the files ever opened are located in a single directory tree. This tree usually starts at /usr/local/share/epos, but it can be changed at configure time. For example, after issuing cd src ./configure --prefix=/usr/local and after recompiling and reinstalling Epos, the files will be searched under /usr/local/lib/epos. See configure --help for more details on configuring Epos. It is also possible to use the command line option base_dir at Epos startup to change the tree base without recompilation. Files of the same type -- and related to the same language or voice, if applicable -- are located in the same subdirectory by default. Thus, the path name actually used by Epos consists of the base directory path, the subdirectory (or directory for short) and a relative file name. This makes it possible to move either the whole configuration structure, or a specific part of it, or a single file to another place. The relative file name may contain slashes (directory name separators). If they only occur in the middle of the name, the file name is still relative to the directory it would normally be located in. However, if the file name begins with a slash or with ./, the file is treated as absolute or relative to the current working directory of the Epos process, respectively. The second case is thus slightly unreliable, but the first one allows to place any file in an arbitrary directory. Likewise, if the directory name begins with a slash, it is not considered to be relative to the base directory. Changing these options in run time does not immediately cause re-reading the renamed files. All of the options in this section are unless stated otherwise. --base_dir Only changeable on the command line. The value is an absolute directory name. This option can be used to change the location of the whole configuration structure, which can also be used for trying out Epos before installing it: cd src ./eposd --base_dir ../cfg Daemon Startup Options

All options in this subsection are . They also usually have no effect if changed during run time; change them in the configuration files instead and request Epos . --preload_voices When set, Epos tries to initialize the synthesizer configurations for all voices during the startup. This will cause unreachable remote voices and local voices without a speech inventory installed to disappear from the configuration. This option will cause a considerable increase in memory consumption or startup time in some cases. --prefer_portaudio This option has no effect unless Epos has been compiled with the --enable-portaudio=yes option (a configure option, not an Epos option). Epos normally supports an unlimited number of OSS sound cards, one of them representing the #localsound TTSCP output module. With this option, Epos will use the PortAudio library for #localsound output instead. Using this option has adverse impact on some functionality, such as the --daemon_log The value is a file name. This option can be used to set the file where various information about the Epos process is recorded. At the moment that is of little practical use except for debugging. --syslog Log all TTSCP error messages with syslogd, if the syslog facility is available. Due to the internal design of Epos, some of these messages are never actually sent over TTSCP to anyone - for example, a fatal misconfiguration condition detected before the first client connects; but they're logged anyway. --full_syslog Log all TTSCP completion messages with syslogd, if the syslog facility is available, including 1xx and 2xx class messages. When set, all TTSCP messages are preceded with their numeric codes as in TTSCP when logging using --server_pwd_file The value is a file name. This option can be used to force the server to store its internal password to a file. This password can then be used for TTSCP authentication in order to issue restricted commands such as --debug_password The value is a string. The string may be used instead of the server password. Use of this option usually makes TTSCP insecure and is discouraged. --restr_file The file named by this parameter provides access control in TTSCP to individual options. Its syntax is described . This option can only be changed from the command line. --listen_port The TCP port number where the daemon should be listening for incoming TTSCP connections. The daemon will check if no other service is already running on that port and refuses to run if the port is already occupied. --local_only When this option is set, the daemon accepts no new connections on network interfaces except the localhost one. This way, only clients running on the same machine can connect to the server. If this option is not set, the server accepts new connections on all available interfaces. Debugging Options

Various kinds of debugging information can be printed by Epos to standard output. The amount of it is configurable. Most debugging information is printed throughout the code using the level | debugging messages | easy invocation | typical examples @ 3 | rare | -D | major events, warnings @ 2 | normal | -DD | informative messages @ 1 | verbose | -DDD | detailed debugging printouts @ 0 | detailed | -DDDD | miscellaneous chaos @ Severity levels Both options in this subsection are . --debug This option must be and syslog logging. --debug_level The minimum severity level of debugging messages which should be printed.