eSpeak-NG on osx

Technology
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Has anyone here got eSpeak-NG to compile on osx? (trying to figure out if my problems are related to my machine, my incompetence, or eSpeak’s quirks, all of which, severally and jointly, are possible)

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Hi @cbowern,

It looks like building espeak-ng requires autotools:

https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/building.md

In order to build eSpeak NG, you need:

  1. a functional autotools system (make, autoconf, automake, libtool and pkg-config);
  2. a functional c compiler that supports C99 (e.g. gcc or clang). Note: if building with speechPlayer, a C++ compiler is required.

In case this is unfamiliar to you or anyone reading this, autotools is a bunch of tools for building C applications. I believe that the main tools necessary to compile an app like this are configure and make or, more probably, cmake. These do not come built-in on Macs. The second requirement, a C compiler (gcc), does seem to come default on Macs, at least my fairly recent install has it.

I think autotools is included with XCode, which is a beast of an IDE that Apple distributes for various kinds of software development. Perhaps there is another way to install it, but my impression, FWIW, is that a lot of people who develop on Macs install XCode. (Given my personal development habits — JS in the browser and/or deno — I don’t usually bother installing XCode, so I am not equipped to try installing this immediately.)

(There is some mention of using emscripten to run espeak-ng directly in the browser, which would certainly be a compelling (and distributable) way to use it. I will look into whether setting that up also requires compilation with autotools or if there is some sort of binary. emscripten is a pretty mysterious to me.)

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aha. Looks like the problem was that when IT reimaged my hard drive (as a solution to being unable to connect to the campus internet for 8 months), xcode wasn’t reinstalled. Now to figure out how to free up enough hard drive space to install it. (This article is useful, but ultimately sharing for the “table of content”, which should be a thing)

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further update, that due to Apple’s new security features it’s impossible to install into usr/local, so for some reason while I can run the “espeak” functions fine I can’t run the ones that rely on espeak-NG