Re: [g-a-devel] Gnome accessibility projects list

[Samuel Thibault <samuel thibault ens-lyon org>]

Michael Zacherle, le Sat 28 Oct 2006 19:46:43 +0200, a écrit :
> > lp foo.brf
> >
> > or even
> >
> > lp foo.txt
> 
> but what do we do with braille embossers that do more than just text? We do 
> have a Tiger (www.viewplus.com), and this printer does graphics too (with 8 
> dot levels).

Ow, I didn't know such great products exist!  I guess in such case the
cups filter should be able to print braille dots for submitted text
files, and graphics for submitted graphical files.

> It has the ability to detect when special tiger fonts are used 
> under Windows and then translates the font to braille.
> 
> If you use, say, Arial, then it prints the graphical representations
> of the font, not the braille code.

So you mean that if you submit a text document that has both text and
dots, it will ink-print text, and emboss dots?  With unicode text, this
is quite easy to do in CUPS (dot patterns are characters U+28xy).  The
CUPS driver would just need an option for choosing whether to translate
text into dots.

Now, mixing real graphical stuff along braille dots has yet to be
defined.  The problem is that graphical formats like pdf/ps/whatever
don't necessarily know what a braille dot pattern is, so you may just
not be able to express that.  I'll check whether at least pdf/ps files
can express unicode glyphs, so that we may just do like unicode text.

Samuel