Installation

Choose a Text Editor

A text editor is a program for writing text and storing it in a plain format which all computers understand. This is in contrast to Microsoft Word or LibreOffice which have their own particular file formats.

If you are a developer, you may already know which you prefer. Otherwise:

  1. Install Visual Studio Code.
  2. Launch the editor.
  3. Go to the View menu.
  4. Select Extensions.
  5. In the search pane on the left, type @reStructuredText.
  6. Select and install the LeXtudio reStructuredText extension.
  7. In the search pane on the left, type @Python.
  8. Select and install the Don Jayamanne Python extension.

Pick your Python

The version of Python you’re going to use depends on your Operating System. Two examples are documented below:

  • An environment on Linux or MacOSX with Python 3.5 installed from a package repository.
  • An environment on Microsoft Windows 8.1 with Python 3.6.1 downloaded from the Python website.

You should run Turberfield in the most recent Python available for your OS. If you find a more recent version than is shown here, then do pick that.

Create a Python virtual environment

Linux or MacOSX

  1. Install python3.5 using the package manager.

  2. Create a new Python virtual environment:

    $ python3.5 -m venv ~/py3.5

  3. Upgrade your version of pip:

    $ ~/py3.5/bin/pip install --upgrade pip

Microsoft Windows 8.1

  1. Ensure the environment variable ‘%USERPROFILE%’ points to your user directory.

  2. Download and install Python 3.6.1 for Windows.

  3. Create a new Python virtual environment:

    > C:\Program Files (x86)\Python 3.6\python.exe -m venv %USERPROFILE%\py3.6

  4. Upgrade your version of pip:

    > %USERPROFILE%\py3.6\Scripts\pip install --upgrade pip

What’s pip?

When you first install Python, it comes with only a small number of programs to run.

Pip installs packages. That is, programs and libraries. Turberfield is one such library. There are many thousands more. A community of developers puts them on the internet for us to use.

When you invoke pip like this, it goes out to the internet to find the package you want. It downloads it and installs it to your Python environment.

You can also tell pip how much of a package to install. If that package does many things, you can limit it to one particular job, or install everything it is capable of doing.

In a moment, we will install turberfield-dialogue, including all its audio capabilities.

Install Turberfield Dialogue into the Python environment

On Linux and MacOSX:

$ ~/py3.5/bin/pip install turberfield-dialogue[audio]

On Windows 8.1:

> %USERPROFILE%\py3.6\Scripts\pip install turberfield-dialogue[audio]

Download the examples

  1. Download the example source as a zipfile.
  2. Unzip the archive in your home directory.
  3. cd turberfield-dialogue-master