aeneas v1.5.1 now available on GitHub

[Alberto Pettarin]

Dear all,

aeneas v1.5.1 is now available on GitHub (on the master branch) and on PyPI:

https://github.com/readbeyond/aeneas/

Docs: http://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/docs/

Change log: http://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/docs/changelog.html

=== === ===

This minor release extends the benefits of the Python C extension cew,
already available for Linux, to Mac OS X and Windows users. That is,
aeneas will be a bit faster since eSpeak will be called via C instead of
via OS subprocess calls.

This release also includes configuration files for PyInstaller, in case
some users are interested in static builds of aeneas.

Finally, there are bug fixes and code/docs enhancements.

=== === ===

Important Notes

1. Mac OS X users: cew requires libespeak to be installed; you can get
it using the latest brew formula, kindly updated by Daniel Bair:

brew update && brew upgrade --cleanup espeak

Please see
https://github.com/readbeyond/aeneas/blob/master/wiki/INSTALL.md#solving-errors-when-compiling-cew

2. Windows users: the upgrade procedure ("pip install aeneas --upgrade")
should work automatically, if you installed eSpeak in a common location
on your c:\ drive, as the setup script will attempt to locate the eSpeak
library. If something goes wrong, directions instructing you to manually
copy a file will be printed. Please see
https://github.com/readbeyond/aeneas/blob/master/wiki/INSTALL.md#solving-errors-when-compiling-cew-1

3. Mac OS X and Windows users: you might want to wait a few days for the
nice devs at SIL to update their installer to aeneas v1.5.1, which will
avoid you the installation/upgrade pain altogether:
https://github.com/sillsdev/aeneas-installer/releases

4. As always, if cew cannot be located at runtime (i.e., cew was not
compiled correctly), the pure Python code using subprocess will be used.
Slower, but guaranteed to work.

5. aeneas depends on Python module BeautifulSoup4. During the last
checks before releasing aeneas, I discovered that a new version of
BeautifulSoup4 was released as v4.5.0, which include changes that seem
to break aeneas. Therefore, you need to stick with BeautifulSoup4 v4.4.1
for aeneas to correctly read or write XML-like files (e.g., XHTML, SMIL,
TTML). If you do not use XML-like formats, you are not affected.
As a temporary workaround, I just changed the setup.py and
requirements.txt files, to require the exact version for BeautifulSoup
(v4.4.1) and lxml (v3.6.0 --- albeit the latter is not strictly
necessary, v3.6.1 works too). If you experience problems updating
aeneas, be sure to have the correct version ("pip show BeautifulSoup4"
should print "Version: 4.4.1". If not: "pip install
BeautifulSoup4==4.4.1 --upgrade").

=== === ===

The Web App at http://aeneasweb.org/ will (hopefully) be updated soon.

Best regards,

Alberto Pettarin