Software for the Visually handicapped
Utilities for Bharati
Braille
Bharati
Braille: Formatting provisions.
Embossed Braille documents are required to meet specific formatting conventions.
Usually, the output is seen first on a computer screen using Braille fonts
and the document proof-read before sending the contents to an embosser.
For standard English Braille, a number of utilities are available for this
purpose. These generally come under the category of Braille Transcription
utilities. The popular and freely available nfbtrans
application is an example of this utility.
The underlying principle behind a properly formatted Braille Document is
that the reader should be able to discern the manner in which the contents
are presented and this implies that a Braille documents should try and
retain as many features of normal print as possible such as Tables, Headings,
Chapter identifications, Contents page etc. Braille transcription utilities
include features to support these requirements but this requires that special
formatting instructions should be given before the document is embosed.
In other words, the text to be embossed in Braille will contain additional
markers to indicate how the embossing should be done. The nfbtrans utility
mentioned above is rich in such features but it will take considerable
effort for a person to prepare the input document incorporating the commands
for specific transcription. Often it may be required to have portions of
the document in Grade-1 Braille while the basic document itself should
be in Grade-2. Such requirements are handled well during transcription.
Braille transcription utilities work mostly with English (Roman) text though
some of them may work with Greek, Arabic, Hebrew or a few other languagestext.
Braille transcription of text in Indian languages is a very difficult task
since there are no accepted standards for representing Indian language
text which can be recommended for use.
In an embossed document, page numbers are indicated on the first
line of each page and the page numbers occupy the last cell positions.
Page numbering is done automatically during the transcription process.
Also, standard conventions require that centering a line, honouring forced
line breaks etc., should be handled. In other words, in certain situations,
pre-formatting should be permitted and the contents retained as such. Under
normal circumstances, all the 40 cells in a line will be utilized to conserve
paper.
The llf2brl utility has some provision to handle some of the formatting
requirements such as,
Specify Headings
Specify pre-formatting
Specify forced line breaks
and
a few other directives. These are included in the local language document
as specific "tags" enclosed in curly brackets.
{c} text {/c} centers the text
{br} breaks a line and forces a line feed
{pre} text {/pre} retains the format of the
contents specified by "text".
The llf2brl utility will actually generate an intermediate file that includes
equivalent tags which can be seen with any ordinary text editor for English.
This intermediate file can be modified manually and processed further to
yield a version that can be directly handled by nfbtrans. This two step
approach has been taken to simplify the process of generating the final
document that can be transcribed by nfbtrans since nfbtrans requires a
fair amount of formatting tags to be included. Shown below is an example
of a local language file prepared according to the conventions. The Braille
output from this file is also shown below where one can see that the formatting
requirements are properly met.