[orca-list] pronunciation dictionary and unicode characters

[Graham Pearce <grahamwp gmail com>]

Hi all,

I'm a total newbie to Gnome and Orca, having only installed them through 
Vinux a few days ago, and a relative newbie to Linux (I've dabbled with 
it in the past, which came in quite handy for the tale I'm about to relate!)

I installed Voxin to get access to IBM Viavoice because (a) I like its 
voice and (b) it can speak much faster than Espeak under Orca. However, 
I found the way it spells out abbreviations to be annoying. I tried to 
use the pronunciation dictionary to make it say °C as "degrees c" rather 
than "degrees centigrade", but this caused Orca to crash with some sort 
of error message about unicode and being out-of-range (according to my 
sighted assistant). I was only able to recover by loading Speakup, using 
the locate command to find the customisations file, and editing it with 
Nano.

Is there a way to make  this pronunciation entry without crashing Orca, 
or, even better, is there a way to turn off IBM Viavoice's abbreviations?

Thanks!
Graham