[Bug 872190] [NEW] Festival doesn't understand UTF-8

[jherazob]

Public bug reported:

I imagine that this is a job for Upstream, but i still mention it.

Both Debian and Ubuntu have unicode-ized themselves for years now, yet
Festival still cannot process utf-8 strings. This is problematic for
non-english languages. We have to resort to hacks like piping text
through iconv to convert it to iso-8859-1 to be able to use accents and
the like.

I'm using Natty, but have seen the problem for many years. Current
package version is 1:2.0.95~beta-5.1ubuntu2.

Expected: When accents are used, text is spoken correctly
Happened: When accents are used, they are replaced on the spoken text by gibberish and numbers
Test procedure:
Prerrequisite: standard spanish voice, package festvox-ellpc11k
Test command: echo "Esta es una prueba con texto en español y tildes, probémosla allá" | festival --language spanish --tts
Workaround: echo "Esta es una prueba con texto en español y tildes, probémosla allá" | iconv -f utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 | festival --language spanish --tts

** Affects: festival (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of
Accessibility, which is subscribed to festival in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/872190

Title:
  Festival doesn't understand UTF-8

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/festival/+bug/872190/+subscriptions