Text-to-speech no longer working in any PDF apps in Mac 10.8.5.

Text-to-speech is no longer working in any PDF apps in Mac 10.8.4/5. Does anyone know the software component that passes highlight text over to the speech synthesiser? How is this process different in PDF's compared to any other text format?
So far I have tried Preview, Skim, PDFView, Safari, Evernote and Adobe Reader with the result: silence. The only defference being Adobe Reader which speaks the name of the document and not the highlighted text. I've re-applied the Mac OS10.8.5 como-update, fixed prefs, ran FSCheck and changed user. I've tried every method of triggering the text-to-speech function (including custom scripts). Text-to-speech works perfectly in every other respect exept when working with PDF's. When Maveriks arrives I will do a clean install and rebuild my data manually which I'm pretty certain will fix the problem but it would be extremely rewarding to find an actual solution and learn something in the process.

Rawr! I got it to work, sort of. I think I tried so hard because I hated the thought of using alsa-oss. And I discovered a couple bugs in spd-conf! Does anyone care? lol
Basically, I redid my TTS-related configs & put them under ~/ instead of /usr/share, and ran "festival --server" & "speech-dispatcher -s" as a normal user. I also added myself to the "audio" group somewhere along the line, but I don't think that was the issue.
I'm almost afraid to reboot, because, although speech-dispatcher can be started at boot-time through rc.conf's DAEMONS array, I don't think festival can---at least, not in the same way as it can on distros that have the script /etc/default/festival. I'm about to see if I can track down that file, and hope I don't break everything somehow.
KTTSMgr still doesn't see any synthesizers, but I got past the "dummy module" message. Now I'm hoping I'll get some help from someone who actually knows what to do (as opposed to me).
Take care, all
H
P.S One small complaint: Although my speechd.conf specified port 6561, speech-dispatcher's tests showed that it was looking for a connection on port 6560 first, before scanning to find the real port. I had to change to port 6560 to stop the behaviour, even though I never customized the port number in the first place.
Last edited by cautha (2010-05-10 10:53:55)

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