German Umlaut: how to forward through Run to the say command on OS X?

Question

My aim is to make Mathematica speak out German words with Umlauts. I found a hint how to make use of a help function mySpeak that will forward a string to the say command and set the corresponding voice parameter.

However, I have not found a way to successfully forward Umlaut-letters from the notebook (or imported text file) through this mechanism to the say command. It seems that the InputForm formatting implicit of Run "breaks" the Umlaut encoding.

How can I send this exact string with appropriate and successful Umlaut encoding from Mathematica to the OS X terminal?

"say -v Anna öffentlich"

I used a line like this to see where it breaks:

Print[InputForm["say -v Anna öffentlich"]]

which returns:

"say -v Anna Ã[Paragraph]ffentlich"

where [Paragraph] is shown as a symbol.

Answer 1

I don't know if Anna is pronouncing the umlaut correctly, but this result sounds very similar to what comes through the terminal to my tin ears:

In[1]:= RunProcess[{"say", "-v", "Anna", "öffentlich"}]
Out[1]= <|"ExitCode" -> 0, "StandardOutput" -> "", "StandardError" -> ""|>

There's clearly something weird going on with encodings here; using echo instead gives:

In[2]:= RunProcess[{"echo", "Ich öffentlich"}, "StandardOutput"] 
Out[2]= Ich öffentlich

The UTF-8 encoding for "ö" is C3 B6, while the character code codes for "Ã" and "¶" are C3 and B6 respectively in the "WindowsANSI"/"ISOLatin1" encodings, as well as the "Unicode" encoding.

Answer 2

To get the umlaut into the Mac OS X command line properly, you could go the route via RTF export. Here is a function that automates this:

ClearAll[say];
Options[say] = {"Voice" -> "Zarvox"};

say[t_, OptionsPattern[]] := 
 Module[{out = 
    FileNameJoin[{$TemporaryDirectory, 
      "MathematicaOutput" <> StringJoin[Map[ToString, DateList[]]]}]},
   Export[out <> ".rtf", t];
  Run["textutil -convert txt " <> out <> ".rtf -output " <> out <> 
    ".txt && say -v " <> OptionValue["Voice"] <> " < " <> out <> 
    ".txt"];
  DeleteFile[{out <> ".txt", out <> ".rtf"}]]

say["öffentlich", "Voice" -> "Kathy"]

speaks with a bad english accent. Need to work on the "ch" sound... but umlaut works fine.