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Aster Servers - How to make Aster more widely Available
A. Hashmi, B. Barry, R. Lundquist, and M. Krishnamoorthy
Bellcore, Morristown, NJ.
Science Access Project,
Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon.
Department of Computer Science,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
This paper describes two client-server models for using the audio formatting system ASTER. ASTER was
developed by T.V. Raman[1] at Cornell University to produce high quality speech output from documents
marked up in TeX or LaTeX. ASTER is written in Lisp, and the normal way to run it is interactively through
an emacs interface. However, in order to provide a more universal way for people to use ASTER, we have
developed two client-server interfaces. The first allows a user to submit marked up documents in an html form
to ASTER running on the server and to receive back speech commands which can be redirected to the client's
speech synthesizer. The other interface allows a person to run ASTER on a server through a telnet session but
to redirect the synthesizer commands back to the client machine.
Introduction
ASTER (the Audio System for Technical Reading) takes documents written in a markup language such as TeX
or LaTeX and provides audio-formatted speech output through a DECtalk speech synthesizer such as the
Multivoice or the DECtalk Express. The history of ASTER is that it was originally written in Lucid Common
Lisp and was then ported to CLISP. It currently runs on a variety of workstations including Sparcs, HPs, DEC
Alphas and PCs running Linux. The usual way to run ASTER is interactively through an emacs interface. This
emacs interface allows the reader to put the marked up document in an emacs buffer and submit it to ASTER,
which is running as a Lisp subprocess in another emacs buffer. The user is then able to browse the document
using key sequences bound to emacs Lisp commands.
This way of using ASTER is fine if the user has available a unix machine running Lisp, but it is not a general
solution for a large number of users. However, since many users do have World Wide Web access using
browsers such as W3, Lynx and Netscape, we have therefore developed an html-based client-server system for
using ASTER.
Web access to ASTER
The Web client-server interface to ASTER is based on an html form. The user puts his marked up document
into a multiline form space on an html form and submits that form to the server, which then runs ASTER on
the submitted document. The output of ASTER is a string of synthesizer command sequences which are
returned to the client and routed to the hardware speech synthesizer.
Client
The client is any system running a Web browser which has forms capability, since an important feature of this
client-server system is the creation of a ``form'' in html. This form is filled in by the user and submitted back to
the server. The form type used does not limit the length of the input, which may be a single sentence or an
entire book. The user has two options. Either he can type the data directly into the form area or he can ``paste''
it from another window.
Server