Re: [BRLTTY] Braille coding in Gnopernicus

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Jan:

I am taking the liberty of CC-ing the GAP list again.

I have an idea what the problem is here, and a possible solution (below).

Jan Buchal wrote, on the BrlTTY list

> Hello,
>
> I'm not sure if my email is not of topic in this list but I asked in
> GAP list already and I am not sure if the problem is solved. 
>
> So, I would like use Gnopernicus with brltty's api with ISO-Latin2 or
> better UTF-8 characters. One man from gap said that gnopernicus works in
> utf-8 but actually the braille display shows ISO1 only. Where is
> problem, how can I do?
>  
I think there are two problems.  One is that although gnopernicus uses 
UTF-8 almost everywhere, it does its own braille dot conversions.  So it 
can't pass UTF-8 on to BrlAPI at the moment, with its current architecture.

The other problem is that currently, unless I am mistaken, gnopernicus' 
braille tables are 8 bit tables, and gnopernicus always assumes Latin-1.

Latin-2 is also 8-bit, so in theory the current gnopernicus architecture 
could handle this, but it would need to know when to convert from UTF-8 
to Latin-2 instead of UTF-8 to Latin-1.  I am not even totally sure that 
gnopernicus is converting from UTF-8 to Latin-8 now, before it does a 
braille table lookup, but it probably should be.

If gnopernicus had a Latin-2 table that worked for your locale, then I 
think we could solve the problem by including the "character set" in the 
braille table, at the top, and making sure gnopernicus did the correct 
UTF-8 to 8-bit conversion for the given table before doing a character 
lookup.  From there on, the correct dots should be sent to BrlAPI.  
Remus, please correct me if I have this wrong.

A better solution long-term would not be limited to an 8-bit braille 
table lookup, but this is the sort of thing 'gnome-braille' attempts to 
handle.

regards,

Bill

> Thanks.
>