Tobi—Frequently Asked Questions

Tobi—Frequently Asked Questions

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General Questions about Tobi

Is Tobi free, open-source software? 

Tobi is available free of charge, and is distributed under open-source licensing that allows commercial development (dual LGPL / BSD). Tobi is built with extensibility in mind, based on a plug-in architecture that greatly facilitates the development of new features, and the incorporation of external contributions.

What can I use Tobi for? 

Tobi is a multimedia production tool that enables creation of DAISY 3 Digital Talking Books and EPUB 3 media overlays.

What are the main features of Tobi? 

  • Tobi is designed to ease the process of synchronizing a text document with human narration, including page numbers, hierarchical table of contents, images, footnotes, etc.
  • Tobi provides a live recording workflow that is fully-integrated with structured text (i.e. document markup).
  • Tobi can import external audio clips
  • Tobi’s zoomable and multilevel waveform editor supports selection, delete, insert, cut/copy/paste, playback, punch-in punch-out recording, etc.
  • Tobi enables the creation of verbal and pictorial image descriptions catering to specialized needs of end users. 
  • Basic structural editing is planned for a future release so it is recommended to author text documents as part of a proven XML workflow, and use Tobi for multimedia synchronization only.

What standards are supported by Tobi’s export? 

Tobi can currently export the project to EPUB 3 media overlays or a full-text, and audio DAISY 3 book. You can also downgrade DAISY books to a DAISY 2.02 fileset, in order to support legacy reading devices, using DAISY Pipeline.

What formats can be imported in Tobi? 

  • You can import a text document or an existing book in the following formats to Tobi:
  • XHTML 5.0 document or semantically-rich DTBook XML document format, which is currently used by DAISY, NIMAS and EPUB.
  • EPUB 3 text only, EPUB 3 media overlays and DAISY 3 full-text full-audio Digital Talking Books to re-purpose or fix material that is already published.
  • Obi projects to upgrade audio-only content to full-text full-audio.

 Is there an auto save option in Tobi? 

There is an auto save option in Tobi but it is still recommended to save the project frequently.

If a crash occurs, what all will I loose? 

If a crash occurs, you will loose any text editing done after you last saved the project. The audio data will remain on the disk, but it will not be linked to the project. You will have to inspect audio files manually to find the required audio data. To see how the project directory is organized, refer to Project and Application Directories.

Tobi Installation

What are Tobi’s system requirements ? 

  • Tobi supports Windows XP (SP2 minimum, SP3 recommended), Vista and Seven.
  • Tobi is a 32 bit application that runs on 32 bit (aka x86) or 64 bit (aka x64) machines.
  • Tobi requires the .NET “managed” runtime libraries of DirectX 9.
  • Tobi supports versions 3.5-SP1 and 4.0 of the .NET framework.
  • Tobi runs best on a computer with at least 1GB of RAM, a fast processor and a decent video card.

Tobi Accessibility

Is Tobi an accessible application? 

Tobi is an accessible application with the following accessibility support:

  • Tobi’s user interface is based on WPF (UI-Automation) and has been designed to function well with screen readers. Tobi has been successfully tested with JAWS (version 9 minimum required), NVDA (which is free and open-source) and Windows’ built-in Narrator.
  • Tobi features its own screen magnification. Because the application user interface is based on vector graphics, you will find that icons and other crucial elements (like the audio waveform display) remain crisp even when zooming-in.
  • Every command in Tobi has a keyboard shortcut that is customizable using the application preferences dialog.
  • Tobi makes use of system colors so that Windows high-contrast themes are applied to the user interface automatically. Tobi’s application preferences can be customized with user-selected colors for advanced user interface items like the audio waveform editor.

 How can I magnify Tobi’s UI? Can I magnify a component without affecting others? 

There are various magnification features that apply to the entire UI or data panes (Document Pane and Audio Editor Pane) only. To know more about these features, click on the links below:

Tobi’s User Interface

Can I hide or resize the UI components? 

Tobi’s panes (Document pane, Navigation pane, and Audio Editor pane) are always visible. But, they can be resized using the dividers separating them. Dividers can be easily located as they get highlighted as soon as mouse pointer moves over them. Thereafter, you can drag them horizontally or vertically to adjust the width and height of the panes. Note: dividers do not receive keyboard focus and thus the panes can not be resized using keyboard strokes.

How can I hide the toolbars of Tobi? 

A toolbar can be hidden or shown by clicking on its extreme left corner. Keyboard users can move the focus to the toolbar and press Enter. For further details, refer to Toolbars.

Tobi and Text

Can I perform text editing in Tobi? 

Tobi supports basic text editing. You can modify the text of a sentence: correct misspelled words, add a missing word, remove redundant words, or change the entire text of a sentence. But, you can not add a new sentence as structure editing is not currently supported by Tobi.

Can I add a new paragraph in Tobi? 

You cannot add a new item (sentence, paragraph, image, etc) in Tobi as it does not currently support structure editing.  You can alter the underlying XML document of the project, which is stored in the .xuk file. For more information on how to handle XUK files, please visit the Tobi forum where you can contact the experts.

Tobi and Audio

Does Tobi have any Text To Speech features? 

Tobi includes support for SAPI 5 voices installed on the computer where the application is running The speech synthesizer can be invoked to generate audio content for individual text fragments or for entire sections of the text document (in which case the finer granularity of the text/audio synchronization is preserved). SAPI voices are listed directly in Tobi’s audio preferences, where the user can choose a particular voice to use before running the TTS generation. Future versions of Tobi will include support for lexicons and other advanced TTS features, but for true automated TTS production we recommend using SSML and the DAISY Pipeline.

Does Tobi support punch recording? 

You can perform punch recording in Tobi:

  • Mark punch-in and punch-out points using Begin selection and End selection commands respectively.
  • Give the Record command. Tobi will start replacing the selected audio by new recording.

What audio formats can be imported in Tobi? 

Tobi enables you to import audio files of MP3, MP4-AAC, and WAV formats.

How can I make out whether there is audio corresponding to a sentence? 

If there is no audio corresponding to a sentence, Tobi will display missing audio in place of its waveform in the Audio Editor pane.

How can I instruct Tobi to keep on playing the audio continually? 

The command Play auto advance plays the audio content of the project continually, starting from the current position. This command can be executed by pressing Shift+Ctrl+Alt+Space, or by using the Play auto advance button of the Audio toolbar.

I exported the audio for external processing, but closed the dialog box without modifying the exported file. How can I re-instate the audio content after external editing? 

  • To replace some audio content with processed audio, do the following:
  • Select the audio that you wish to replace.
  • Click Audio->Import audio file(s) on the menu, or press Shift+Ctrl+I.
  • Select the processed file from the dialog just opened, and click on the Open button. Tobi will replace the selected audio with the audio content from the file.
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