From hzoebelein at gmail.com Thu May 7 08:18:39 2009 From: hzoebelein at gmail.com (Hans Zoebelein) Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 10:18:39 +0200 Subject: [Fwd: Preparing documents for Braille printing - Announcing Transcribo: a plain text renderer for Docutils] Message-ID: <4A02995F.4080600@gmail.com> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Preparing documents for Braille printing - Announcing Transcribo: a plain text renderer for Docutils Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 12:59:32 +0200 From: Leo Reply-To: fhaxbox66 at googlemail.com, Developing software for blind Linux users To: Hi all, looking for a cross-platform, open-source software preparing structured documents for Braille printing, I finally decided to start my own project named Transcribo. It is hosted on http://transcribo.berlios.de/. It is written in the Python programming language and builds on Docutils (http://docutils.sourceforge.net). Docutils parses text written in a light-weight, easy-to-learn, extensible mark-up language called reStructuredText (rst). While rst has many features that make it suitable for writing technical documentation, it is general enough to allow authoring any kind of structured document. The simplicity and power of reStructuredText make it suitable for authoring large documents for Braille printing as well. One objective of Transcribo is to distinguish different content types in a single document and associate dedicated translators with these. Hence, Transcribo easily integrates with third-party software for contracted Braille (see e.g. http://yabt.berlios.de). Transcribo consists of two parts: - first, a general purpose plain text renderer that is based on frames to handle the layout, and ContentManagers responsible for translations, text wrapping etc. - second, a writer component for Docutils called rst2txt. It provides the bridge between the Docutils raw output and the renderer. The output of rst2txt is customizable through styles. All this is very much pre-alpha, even if the demo scripts show that nested lists and enumerations can already be rendered. I believe that Transcribo's planned features could make it a very powerful authoring solution for Braille printing. Apart from the Docutils - rst2txt - renderer tool chain, other input formats such as odf, rtf etc. are conceivable if a good soul wrote suitable frontends for the renderer. Clearly, all this requires really really a lot of work which I can hardly do alone due to many other commitments. See a more detailed description including all the links below. Any feedback and help is warmly welcomed. Feel free to join the mailing list. The source code can be obtained by checking out the Mercurial repository. Regards Leo Transcribo - a plain text rendering library written in Python ================================================================= Project home: http://transcribo.berlios.de/ Mercurial repository: http://hg.berlios.de/repos/transcribo/ Mailing-List: transcribo-dev at berlios.de Version: 0.1 (experimental) Author: Dr. Leo License: GPL (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.html) (c) 2009 Dr. leo 1. Introduction ================= Transcribo is a pure Python library to render input from various sources as plain unicode text. It currently consists of two subpackages: 1.1 rst2txt -------------- In combination with the renderer, this will be a Writer component for Docutils (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/). Once finished, it will allow to render reStructuredText files as plain text. At the same time it demonstrates how the renderer (see below) can be used. rst2txt roughly maps the nodes of the Docutils doctree to Frame instances that form a fram tree. However, the frame tree has a somewhat different structure than the docutils doc tree as frames do not necessarily reflect the document structure. E.g., sections are not rendered as parent frames of the section content, but at the same level. The rst2txt package is heavily under construction. Currently, the following node types are supported: document, title, section, paragraph, text, bullet_list, enumerated_list, list_item 1.2 The renderer ------------------------- The renderer is the core of Transcribo. It is premised on an almost complete abstraction of layout and content. * The key concept to achieve simple yet powerful layout capabilities is the Frame class. Each Frame instance represents a rectangular area within the final output. Its position and size are determined dynamically relative to other frames during the rendering process. Frames can be nested. The RootFrame instance controls the rendering process and assembles the line snippets rendered by each frame to form complete text lines. This allows things like multiple columns, nested enumerations etc. In future versions, the RootFrame will also control pagination features. * Content: Leafs of the tree of Frame instances store the actual content within a content.ContentManager instance which, in turn, may store various content elements such as text, mathematical expressions, MusicXML etc. Currently, only GenericText is supported. More precisely, each leaf Frame must have a ContentManager instance which controls the rendering of the content it contains. Each content element is rendered separately. A special feature is the possibility to attach a translator instance to each content object as well as to the ContentManager. This feature is required, in particular, for Braille translation. The ContentManager is also responsible for wrapping and hyphenating the content, if required. All aforementioned features are highly configurable through dictionaries passed to the constructors. 2. the Frame API ====================== (to be completed; meanwhile please see the documented sources and the test.py script) 3. The ContentManager API ============================== (to be completed; meanwhile please see the documented sources and the test.py script) 4. Testing ============== The test subdirectory contains two test scripts that should work out of the box: * test.py: demonstrates the renderer API by rendering a nested enumeration. * rst2txt.py is a command line tool. A demo text file shows some of the features of the rst2txt writer. 5. Contributing ================== Development is in an early stage. Any help is very much appreciated. Feel free to join the mailing list, check out the Mercurial repository and start coding, _______________________________________________ Blinux-develop mailing list Blinux-develop at redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-develop -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hzoebelein at gmail.com Wed May 13 15:49:18 2009 From: hzoebelein at gmail.com (Hans Zoebelein) Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 17:49:18 +0200 Subject: [Fwd: [emacspeak The Complete Audio Desktop] Announcing emacspeak 30.0 --- SocialDog!] Message-ID: <4A0AEBFE.4050100@gmail.com> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [emacspeak The Complete Audio Desktop] Announcing emacspeak 30.0 --- SocialDog! Resent-Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 16:50:03 -0400 (EDT) Resent-From: emacspeak at cs.vassar.edu Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 13:43:15 -0700 (PDT) From: T. V. Raman To: emacspeak at cs.vassar.edu Emacspeak-30.0 (SocialDog) Unleashed! For Immediate Release San Jose, CA, (May 11, 2009) Emacspeak: --- Bringing friendly Access For social beings --Zero cost of upgrade/downgrades makes priceless software affordable! Downloads Reference <../info/emacspeak.html> Installation <../install-guide/> Usage <../user-guide/> Tips <../tips.html> Tools <../applications.html> Support EMACSPEAK Logo About the author SourceForge Emacspeak Inc (NASDOG: ESPK) announces the immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak-30 --a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving data and service-oriented social Web cloud. Investors Note With several prominent analysts initiating coverage, NASDOG: ESPK continues to trade over the net at levels close to that once attained by the DogCom high-fliers of yester-years and as of October 2008 is trading at levels close to that achieved by better known stocks in the tech sector. What Is It? Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides / complete eyes-free/ access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. By seamlessly blending all aspects of the Internet such as Web-surfing and electronic messaging into the audio desktop, Emacspeak enables speech access to local and remote information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A rich suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving service-oriented Web cloud. Major Enhancements 1. Speech-enables Twitter. 2. Unicode support for enabling the world's various charsets. 3. Emacs front-end to popular Google AJAX APIs. 4. Updated g-client with preliminary support for Google Docs. 5. Updated URL Templates for rapid Web access. 6. Updated WebSearch wizards for enhanced productivity. 7. Emacs 23 support. See the NEWS file for additional details. -- Posted By T. V. Raman to emacspeak The Complete Audio Desktop at 5/11/2009 01:43:00 PM -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at mielke.cc Fri May 15 04:46:27 2009 From: dave at mielke.cc (Dave Mielke) Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 00:46:27 -0400 Subject: BRLTTY 4.0 has been released. Message-ID: <20090515044627.GV7624@gamma.private.mielke.cc> Release 4.0 of BRLTTY is now available. It can be downloaded from BRLTTY's web site, which is at the following URL: http://mielke.cc/brltty/ This release includes the following changes: General Changes: All screen reading, character handling, and tables are now Unicode-based. The " startup problems" message has been removed. Boot operands may contain multiple items separated by plus signs. USB enhancements and fixes. Windows serial I/O fixes. A UDEV rules file for brltty is provided. An upstart job for brltty is provided. Status Cells: Hard-coded styles have been replaced by user-configurable fields. If there are no status cells then a text region may be reserved for them. The INFO command toggles text maximization if a text region is being used. Braille Drivers: The Pegasus and Seika braille drivers have been added. The BrailleSense braille driver has been renamed to HIMS. Alva Braille Driver: The BC6nn series are supported. Baum Braille Driver: The VarioConnect, EcoVario, VarioPro, and Refreshabraille are supported. BrailleNote Braille Driver: The statuscells= parameter has been removed. EuroBraille Braille Driver: USB support has been added. Robustness has been improved. Bindings for the Esys have been added. FreedomScientific Braille Driver: The statuscells= parameter has been removed. HandyTech Braille Driver: The Evolution models have been redefined to only have text cells. HIMS Braille Driver: The Braille Sense key bindings have been reworked. SyncBraille support has been added. Bluetooth support has been fixed. TSI Braille Driver: The way Seika devices implement PowerBraille emulation is supported. The core's flow control mechanism is used (rather than hard-coded delays). Voyager Braille Driver: The statuscells= parameter has been removed. Key binding changes: CUTAPPEND/CUTLINE moved to CRt# + B/C PRINDENT/NXINDENT moved to CRt# + A+B/C+D XWindow Braille Driver: The font= parameter has been added. SpeechDispatcher Speech Driver: Single characters are now spoken correctly. BrlAPI Server: The version has been changed from 0.5.2 to 0.5.3. enterTtyMode() now works correctly on Windows. Problems when no braille display is connected at startup have been resolved. The core's output is automatically restored when the last client disconnects. Writes to the driver are no longer buffered. Braille keyboard input is now converted to characters. Output to the braille display is now drained the same way the core does. Lisp Bindings: Now compatible with CFFI 0.10.0. Text Tables: The license has been changed from GPL to LGPL. File names have been changed from "text.*.tbl" to "*.ttb". The file extension ".tti" is used for text subtables. Tables must be encoded in UTF-8 (rather than in a local character set). The "byte" keyword is no longer optional. The "dot" directive is no longer supported. The "char" and "include" directives have been added. Language-based tables include common representations for box characters. Tables for several languages have been added. The default is now to select the table based on the locale's name. The tbltest utility has been renamed to ttbtest. The compress, fi2, identity, and simple tables have been removed. The following tables have been renamed (mostly for ISO 639 compliance): cz -> cs fi1 -> fi nabcc -> en-nabcc se -> sv se-old -> sv-1989 visiob -> fr-vs vni -> vi Attributes Tables: The license has been changed from GPL to LGPL. File names have been changed from "attr*.tbl" to "*.atb". The file extension ".ati" is used for attributes subtables. Tables must be encoded in UTF-8 (rather than in Latin1). The "byte" directive is no longer supported. The "include" directive has been added. Contraction Tables: The license has been changed from GPL to LGPL. Tables for several languages have been added. The following tables have been renamed: en-uebc-g2 -> en-ueb-g2 The en-ueb-g2, en-us-g2, and zh-tw tables have been updated. Key tables (for binding keyboard keys to brltty commands) have been added: The file extension ".ktb" is used for key tables. The file extension ".kti" is used for key subtables. The desktop, keypad, and laptop key tables are provided. the -k [--key-table=] option has been added. The -K [--keyboard-properties=] option has been added. Source Tree Changes: The text tables have been moved from BrailleTables/ to Tables/. The attributes tables have been moved from BrailleTables/ to Tables/. The contraction tables have been moved from ContractionTables/ to Tables/. The braille drivers have been moved from BrailleDrivers/ to Drivers/Braille/. The speech drivers have been moved from SpeechDrivers/ to Drivers/Speech/. The screen drivers have been moved from ScreenDrivers/ to Drivers/Screen/. Source for the Windows installer is provided. -- Dave Mielke | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God. Phone: 1-613-726-0014 | Ottawa, Ontario | 2011 May 21 is the Day of Judgement. EMail: dave at mielke.cc | Canada K2A 1H7 | 2011 Oct 21 is the End of the World. http://FamilyRadio.com/ | http://Mielke.cc/bible/