CTAN update: SpeLaTeX
New macro \spelitemcont allows for continuation of \spelitem items after a displaymath environment.
This package is located at https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/spelatex More information is at https://ctan.org/pkg/spelatex
Thanks for the upload. For the CTAN Team Manfred Lotz CTAN is run entirely by volunteers and supported by TeX user groups. Please join a user group or donate to one, see https://ctan.org/lugs .
SpeLaTeX – Create PDF documents with hyperlinks to audiofragments
This package equips the PDF that is generated with LaTeX with hyperlinks to audio files that contain the spoken equivalent of the original text, equations, figures and tables.
The audio files can be automatically generated using a Perl-script called spel-wizard.pl (part of the SpeL::Wizard module available on CPAN). This script interfaces with locally installed text-to-speech software or with online available (paying) cloud services to generate the audio files. To this end, the LaTeX chunks of your text are parsed and translated to “natural language”.
SpeLaTeX is babel-enabled such that your text is read with the correct pronunciation corresponding to your language. So far, it provides the languages English and Dutch, but it will be extended in the future.
You can package your PDF together with the audio-files (in your favorite archive format) and make it available to your users, such that the only requirements to read your text and listen to the audio are a suited PDF reader and media player.
For the text-to-speech conversion, one can use free options (festival, balabolka, ...) or paying services (e.g. AWS polly).
| Package | SpeLaTeX |
| Version | 0.96 2026-04-09 |
| Copyright | 2025–2026 Walter Daems |
| Maintainer | Walter Daems |