Hello. Surprisingly, many people do not have Braille translators. NFBTrans is the only free, open source translator I know of. Most cost many hundreds or thousands of dollars. In the case of PDAs, they can do translation but not reliably. There are many different types of Braille codes. There is Braille music, computer Braille, literary Braille and a special mathematics code. What we want is literary Braille since we are dealing with books. However, most PDAs and embossers would only output computer Braille which is harder to read and takes up more pages. If you look at a Braille embosser formatted file and compare it to the plain text, you will see that the Braille file is usually slightly smaller. That is because of contractions and other things to shorten words. For example, "sh" by itself in Braille is short for shall. "W" by itself is will. Unless such blind people are familiar with a command line or run Linux, most likely they wouldn't have access to a Braille translator and would probably appreciate Braille files being available directly from the PG download pages. I can query a few blind-specific mailing lists if you need more exact stats on how many people would be interested. It would certainly raise the reputation of PG if a press release was issued and the capability was implemented. At 10:32 PM 4/2/2005 +0200, you wrote:
Piping the files thru nfbtrans should pose no problem at all.
Question: won't every blind computer user have this program on his PC already? Won't she be better able to tailor the output to her needs if the program is run locally?
-- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
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