Application Icon

GhostReader Help

Getting creative with Tags

Custom Tags for Characters

Custom tags are absolutely invaluable when you want to "voice" characters in a story. Instead of using bunches of tags together to set up a character's voice every time someone speaks, you can use custom tags, each one defining all the speech settings for a certain character and with a different appearance from other tags. This will save you a lot of time and effort.

As an example, imagine you want to have a story read aloud, which features a dialogue between two characters: a poet and a guide. First, you can create a tag named "Poet" and assign a light-green marker with a male icon to it. In the story, this character is slightly excitable, so you can give the voice a speech rate that is a little bit faster than usual (260 words per minute instead of the default 180). Now assign this new tag to each occurrence of the poet character's direct speech in the text.

Creating a Dialog

When creating a custom tag for the second character in the dialogue, it's a good idea to make sure that its markers will be recognizable and easy to distinguish from the tag markers of the first character.

The second character is named "Guide", and the tag color selected is orange (to set it apart from the light-green markers of "Poet"). Now you can choose a different voice. Additionally, you can set a speech rate that is slower that normal (150 wpm instead of 180), and make the voice slightly quieter. Little changes such as this really can help bring characters to life.

After you have created the tag, you can assign it to all the words in the text that this character says.

Multilingual documents

Suppose you are a teacher and you want to prepare a German dialogue for your students to listen to and repeat. You may also want to give them instructions in English before they listen to the dialogue and some extra information afterwards. To complete this task you will need to create two German-speaking characters as well as adding language tags to your explanatory text.

Here's what you would do in GhostReader:

  1. Add the text that will be used for the dialogue — for example:

    Work in pairs. Listen to the dialogue. Then act out the conversation, substituting the characters' names with your own.
    
    - Guten Tag!
    - Guten Tag! Wie heißen Sie bitte?
    - Ich heiße Eva Moltke.
    - Und mein Name ist Richard Speer.
    - Freut mich, Herr Speer.
    - Gleichfalls, Frau Moltke.
    
    You can find a transcription of the dialog on page 6 of your textbook.
    

  2. Create a custom tag for one of the characters using the Pink marker color, the Female image, German language, and the Julia Infovox iVox HQ voice.

    Note: The voice Julia Infovox iVox HQ was installed using Infovox iVox Voice Manager.

  3. Place the new tag in the text where appropriate.

    All tags that you have added so far are local — that is, they have start and end markers and only affect the text between the markers.

  4. Create a custom tag for the male speaker using the Orange marker color, the Male image, German language, and the Andreas Infovox iVox HQ voice.
  5. Place the tag in the correct places in the dialogue.

    Note that in the illustration, the final "Richard" tag has been placed as a global tag, meaning that the rest of the text will be treated as German and read with Richard's voice. You can tell which language and voice will be used for reading a certain part of the text by placing the cursor there and looking at the status bar at the bottom of the window.

  6. To have the explanatory English text read in the default English voice, add one English language tag at the very beginning of the text and another one where the final "additional information" text starts. Don't forget that you can change the default voices for languages in the Languages pane of GhostReader preferences.

  7. To give students time to get ready to listen to the dialogue and to signal that the dialogue is over, add two Silence tags of "Medium" length.

More in this chapter

Help chapters