[Dtb-talk] Best tool for generating speech on a Mac?

[T. Joseph Carter]

This might really be a question just for Greg, but what tool or tools 
do people find effective for getting text into a form suited to 
desktop and portable spoken form using a Mac?

I generally work with two forms of text--plain text with little to no 
formatting, which is fairly easy to work with, and PDF files, which 
aren't so easy.

In the case of the text files, I find usually the best solution is to 
put them on the Stream and just use that.  I prefer Alex for speech 
quality, but Alex is a total idiot who thinks he is clever when it 
comes to handling punctuation.  Often he totally ignores punctuation 
that is context-vital but misreads things he thinks he understands 
how to "say correctly".  I can usually fix it--it's plain text after 
all--but it's usually faster to put it on the Stream since the Stream 
is a little more intelligent.

In the case of PDF files, columns and hyphenation are the bane of my 
existence.  I can sort of deal with the columnation, but the 
hyphenation is just really annoying.

It seems like a tool designed to get text into spoken form on the Mac 
might be able to solve both problems, but I don't know of anything.

Any thoughts?

Joseph