Festival doesn't understand UTF-8

[jherazob]

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

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.