FYI: Re: Localized braille (Was: Gnopernicus and ISO-Latin2 characters)

["John J. Boyer" <director chpi org>]

Hello All, 

Just so you know, I have developed a braille translator and 
back-translator based on the translator in BRLTtY, which I initially 
coded. It is a library called liblouis which uses the same translation 
table format as BRLTtY, but has added several opcodes. Though it was 
sponsored by a commercial organization, it is Open Source. It handles 
UTF-16, according to the sponsor's requirements. For the translator, the 
input is a UTF-16 string and the output is a string containing a 
localized braille 
translation. It does not handle input and output. That is for the 
calling program. As I understand it, I don't lose much by using UTF-16, 
but I can easily modify the library to use UTF-32. It is much more 
efficient to use a fixed-length encoding internally.

Under the same sponsor, I am also extending liblouis to liblouisxml, 
specifically to handle MathML, though it will also handle generalized 
xml. UTF-8 will be converted to uTF-16 before the braille translator is 
called.

I will be interested to hear comments. Dave Mielke should know about my 
efforts, since I have contacted him about the course of development 
several times.


-- 
John J. boyer; Executive Director, Chief Software Developer
Computers to Help People, Inc.
www.chpi.org
6033 Monona Drive, suite 205; Madison, WI 53716