Re: Gnopernicus, BRLTTY & Swedish characters

[Dave Mielke <dave mielke cc>]

[quoted lines by Peter Korn on 2003/12/09 at 22:15 -0800]

>Gnopernicus has a variety of non-text dot patterns used to indicate a 
>variety of things.  What thoughts do you have on how those could be 
>preserved yet have Gnopernicus send text for the text portions?  

We're in the process of enhancing BrlAPI in order to handle a mixtyure of text,
highlighted text, and graphics. What we're doing is adding a routine which
takes the text to be displayed, an optional mask to be anded for dots which are
to be cleared, and an optional mask to be ored for dots which are to be set.
This should give maximum flexibility to applications as it handles simple text
at one extreme, full "graphics" at the other, and concepts like underlining in
the middle.

>Also, as 
>Bill noted, we do need to address the problem of Braille table localization 
>for a very wide set of languages (which may be interspersed within a single 
>document, ideally with appropriate language tagging).  Do you have any 
>thoughts on where the right place to address that is and how?

This requirement is probably best handled by Gnopernicus doing the dot
translation. Am I correct in assuming that each localized area of text is
associated with some given font? If so, I think a reasonable way to approach
this problem is to maintain a table which associates a font name with a braille
table. Since many fonts would probably point to the same braille table, you may
wish to consider adding a level of indirection, e.g. a font group, so that,
say, all English fonts could be switched from one braille table to another via
a single operation.

One of the dilemmas you may have is that you, quite understandably, only want
to publish accurate tables whereas average users, especially those willing to
help you out during development, would be satisfied with far less. The ideal
for such users, which BRLTTY does provide, is to make the tables easily
editable by the user. If you can point me to wherever your translation table
format is described, I'll add to our tools a way to convert a BRLTTY table to a
Gnopernicus table and vice versa.

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