I finally gave up on Festival. After much searching on the net, I found mention of flite (Festival Lite). I installed it and it has the US female HTS voice included. So, problem solved. Wow, I'll try that too. I actually tried to postpone compiling festival on pi since it did look like the required...

I would be thrilled to have a fix on this, too. It seems that it could be some kind of version related issue, if your error is something like "Error: HTS_Model_load_pdf: Failed to load header of pdfs." I got this one too with Ubuntu 12.10. "References to this error on the hts-users list suggest it's...