Re: brltty and simultaneous grade 2 translation

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, John J. Boyer wrote:

> I like Dave's suggestion of putting the number first in the rules. This
> number actually indicates a pattern-matching method. So the algorithm would
> be more than a simple pattern replacement. I know French. Where could I find
> their Braille code, preferably on the Web?

Don't know.  I learned compressed French braille a couple years ago.  
Although I still can read it more or less with surrounding context, I fear I
wouldn't be able to write it anymore.  There are the pretty generic rules
which are sensible, but you must also account for the hundreds of ad hoc
rules.

> I think that a direct dot pattern representation would not be as clear as
> using the ASCII characters that are used to represent Braille dot patterns
> in the particular language. Don't the text-translation tables already take
> care of translating to whatever characters a particular display needs to
> represent a particular dot pattern. 

Well... not necessarily.  At least not in French, especially when it comes 
to computer braille.  French braille is quite well defined for 
paper literature, but computer braille is a much random matter, especially 
for non alphabetical characters.  A simple dot "." may translate to 
different dot pattern depending on your taste.  I even got my own braille 
table to use with BRLTTY as I couldn't stand the other available tables 
which seemed not natural to me.

Therefore it would be much simpler, at least for the French braille 
compression, to just tell BRLTTY: replace each "ation" sufix in a word by 
dots 3-4, "ent" sufixes by dot 1-2-6, and so on, since that's actually how 
it is defined for paper document and not fiddle with the current braille 
table for the non translated case.  Still I may wish to read compressed 
English text without having to change my own braille table for something I 
couldn't understand just because the braille compressor was defined with a 
particular braille table in mind.


Nicolas