Generating Unicode Braille Patterns

[reiner-dolp]

I am trying to generate Unicode Braille Patterns by post processing the output of file2brl.

However, I do not understand what the default output format is. I suspected it to be Braille ASCII. However, this does not seem to be true: Providing the german word "höhe" as input and using the german grade 0 table (de-de-g0.utb) yields "h9he" instead of the expected "h[he". Whats the output format generated by the default tables?

[reiner-dolp]

I would consider this to be a "documentation issue", not a "question".

The functionality is actually built-in. Simply use the Unicode Braille Patterns Table (unicode.dis):

> lou_translate unicode.dis,de-de-g0.utb
höhe
\x2813\x282a\x2813\x2811

However, i still do not unterstand what the default output format is:

> lou_trace -f de-de-g0.utb 
höhe
h9he
1.  lowercase   h   125
2.  lowercase   ö  246
3.  lowercase   h   125
4.  lowercase   e   15

häuser
h`user
1.  lowercase   h   125
2.  lowercase   ä  345
3.  lowercase   u   136
4.  lowercase   s   234
5.  lowercase   e   15
6.  lowercase   r   1235

The documentation only mentions "[...] It causes the dot patterns to be Unicode Braille rather than the liblouis representation" without defining the terms "liblouis representation" and "unicode braille".

[egli]

Unicode handling is notoriously broken with the liblouis tools such as lou_translate or lou_trace. I think I believe that I have fixed this in master (starting from liblouis/liblouis@e93cd548a930ef59fb78eb2873de191cdd62ccf0 it should work).

Regarding documentation I honestly would like to have better doc too. You can maybe ask on the mailing list for some advice. Also I would be happy to merge a patch that improves the documentation.

[reiner-dolp]

A "Getting Started Guide" in the style of the Elastichsearch-Reference would be awesome. I am trying to write a short tutorial as soon as I am more confident with the tool.

[egli]

That would be great, thanks