iTunes icon Document Processing

Before converting a document to audio and transferring it to iTunes, iSpeak It can ensure that your document is separated into a number of sections (resulting in multiple tracks in iTunes). iSpeak It can also apply replacement rules that change problem words and phrases into phonetic equivalents and/or add silence after paragraphs and sentences to allow for extended breaks (so you can clearly differentiate sentence and paragraph endings while listening to the document).

These settings are accessible via the Document Processing section of an iTunes Transfer.

The split option allows you to to take a long document and partition it into multiple tracks, much like an audiobook. You can control whether or not you want to split on words (separated by whitespace), sentences (separated by ., ?, or !), paragraphs or page breaks. Paragraph splitting will first check to see if there are blank lines, and if there are, use them to identify paragraphs. If there are no blank lines iSpeak It will use carriage returns (the default in Word documents) to identify paragraphs. Page breaks work well with Word documents and PDFs — iSpeak It will automatically put a page break at the end of every page when processing a PDF document.

Alternatively, you can specify a sequence of characters to use for splitting your document (with the sequence being removed prior to transfer). This is useful when you want to split a document into chapters — add a unique set of characters (say "=======") to the beginning of each chapter and iSpeak It will generate separate tracks for each chapter.

Note that the split option is ignored for Directions and Weather — for these splitting doesn't make sense (for example, splitting based on paragraphs will lead to lots of small tracks where you really want all of the information in one track). This way you can keep your split settings optimized for your documents. Further, when splitting is active your RSS feeds and News will automatically split between articles — each article will be a separate track in an album for that feed.

The Xgrid option allows you to use multiple Macs on a network to process the individual sections of a document (as defined by your split settings).

Selecting Apply Replacement Rules will have all defined rules applied to a document before it is transferred to iTunes (including extending breaks between sentences and paragraphs).

For long documents it is recommended that you use splitting. This ensures that iSpeak It can work with manageable chunks of the document (processing an entire 30 page document can overwhelm the storage on your Mac).