How to improve Heather\'s pronunciation for digital papers

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 28th February, 2011

Although Heather is pretty good at pronouncing most words correctly, there will be some terms which are not spoken correctly.

You can use the PDFaloud Pronunciation Dictionary to fix this but this involves checking which words are not spoken correctly and adding them to the dictionary one at a time.

Thankfully, Lizzie Sanderson at Robert Gordon’s College has gone through some SQA past papers and created a PDFaloud pronunciation dictionary for the Heather voice.

To add these to the PDFaloud pronunciation dictionary means copying and pasting them into the PDFaloud ‘pron.ini’ file. There is a default ‘pron.ini’ file and each user also has their own ‘pron.ini’ file.

Default pron.ini file

The Default pron.ini file is used when you create a new user profile on the computer or network and so if you modify this default file all new users will have the new pronunciations in their dictionaries. It doesn't affect the pron.ini file of users who already have a user profile on the computer or network. To modify the default pron.ini file go to:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\plug_ins\Texthelp\defaults (Adobe Reader)

Or

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\plug_ins\Texthelp\defaults (Adobe Acrobat)

and double click on pron.ini. It will open in Notepad.

Right-click on Lizzie’s list and open in Notepad (not Microsoft Word), select and copy the new pronunciations, then paste them into the pron.ini file. Save the file.

Note that Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat have separate pron.ini files so if you want the new pronunciations in both, modify both files.

User pron.ini file

Changing the default pron.ini file will add the new pronunications for new user profiles, but it will not change the pronunciation dictionaries for existing users. Each existing user on the computer has their own individual pron.ini file, which on a standalone PC is in

C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\pdfaloud 3.0.

To add Lizzie’s list to a user pron.ini file that has already been created, you have two options:

a)    find and delete each user’s pron.ini file (which will also delete any new pronunciations the user has added themselves), start Adobe Reader or Acrobat, and a new pron.ini file based on the default one will be automatically created by PDFaloud;

b)    or find the file for each user and copy and paste the new pronunciations into it.

Restart Reader or Acrobat to load the new pronunciations.

Note that on a networked PC the user pron.ini file may be on the network.

If you find other words that Heather does not pronounce correctly please let us know.