Distributing braille documens digitally, suggestions please

Samuel Thibault samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org
Thu Oct 13 16:22:10 UTC 2005


Lloyd Rasmussen, le Thu 13 Oct 2005 10:20:00 -0400, a écrit :
> The Unicode range 2800-28ff is the "official" way to represent any 8-dot 
> braille pattern, but I don't know whether anyone actually uses and supports 
> it.

BRLTTY does support it when getting input from BrlAPI clients.
Braille tables in gnome-braille use it too.

> >Now, how would you go about distributing braille in an electronic
> >format over the internet?

Just using the U+2800 unicode range should be fine. Of course, some
ASCII textual hint at the beginning of the document about the language
of the document might help indeed (so as to know whether this is
Japanese or English, for instance...)

> > In particular, I am thinking
> >about braille music notation,

There is the U+1D100 Unicode range for plain music. I don't know whether
there exist an agreement on how a record should be written precisely,
but symbols are there to be used.

> >Is there actually a standard way of specifying an ASCII files braill
> >encoding, or will I have to rely on guesswork?

ASCII is just characters 0-127.

Now, about just braille encoding, there is the ISO/TR 11548-1 8-bit
encoding, which is used by BRLTTY, gnopernicus, BrlAPI, ...

> How about encoding variants?

Manufacturers have other encodings, but they are no standards.

Regards,
Samuel Thibault
PS: BTW, how are you going? It's been a long time since last news...




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