General EQWatcher Concepts > The Basics > Pronunciation Guides

Pronunciation guides (PGs) tell EQWatcher how to pronounce words when using Text-to-Speech (TTS).  The default pronunciation guide shows how to replace acronyms like "afk" with the full "away from keyboard" meaning.  PGs should also be used to force EQWatcher to pronounce names such as "luclin" correctly.  Without a pronunciation guide, this word is pronounced as "lou' klin" (I don't know the exact phonetic spellings or any of that, but you get what I mean).  To pronounce it as it looks to a human (at least... humans where I come from.  Hell, some people pronounce it looshlin) it can be changed to "lucklin", which makes it pronounced "luck' lin".  Please note that PGs only modify what is sent to TTS, not what EQWatcher sees.  All words used in the pronunciation guide must contain only letters, no spaces, numbers, etc.

At any rate, if you listen to Text-to-Speech long enough you will find some commonly heard words that EQWatcher (and any program using the same TTS engine) needs help pronouncing.

The EQWatcher Advanced Pronunciation Guide editing software is found on your start menu in the EQWatcher Advanced section.  The editor is quite easy to use, which you will see when you run it (Start the program now and I will run you through it quickly).

On the left hand side of the main window, you see a nice big list box, full of words.  Click on the top word in the list "ae".  You see the word "ae" come up in the "Replace" edit box, and "area of effect" come up in the "with this" edit box.  You can change either box, but in order to save your changes to the current list, you must hit the Update button.

The actual PG file is not modified until you save the list.  Saving can be done from the file menu using either "Save As" or "Save...", and any windows user should recognize how to use those.  Opening of course can then be done by using "Open..." from the file menu.

To clear the current PG list, you must hit "New" in the file menu.

To add a new entry to the current PG list, hit the "New" button on the dialog box, which is found next to the list.  To delete the currently selected entry, hit "Delete".

The "Save & Exit" and "Exit w/o Save" buttons do exactly what they say (Save & Exit will save to the currently selected file, which is seen on the title bar).

You should now recognize how to create your own pronunciation guide as well as modify existing ones.

To put Pronunciation Guides to use in EQWatcher, you can load them manually (by File->Load PG each time you run EQWatcher), or by putting a load command in a commands file (such as startup.ews, which is run automatically when you run EQWatcher).  The syntax for the "load pg" command is "load pg "[filename]"".  This can be done inside EQ using the generic note command "/note load pg "myfile.pg"" if needed.