[BRLTTY] re: Python brlapi and translation table question

[Samuel Thibault]

Hi,

Nicolas Pitre, le Thu 16 Nov 2006 11:41:25 -0500, a écrit :
> > 2.  We are looking forward to the AND/OR function.  Please let me know if
> > I can help here.
> 
> Please don't abuse it.  Don't try to manage braille table yourself for 
> example.

What do you mean?

- Not have their own bunch of files containing braille tables?  I somewhat
agree.
- Not translate dot themselves?  I don't necessarily agree.  The problem
comes with languages for which the text to braille translation process
is not 1-to-1, like kanji-based languages.  In that case, having smooth
text scrolling requires knowing precisely how many cells the text
required, etc.  Letting brltty translate parts of the text doesn't allow
such control.  Directly providing brltty the whole text to be translated
and scrolled drops even more control from LSR.

The approach that Bill proposed with gnome-braille may be fine: have
a common translation library which would translate braille at the
application level, allowing full-featured scrolling. The tables for
1-to-1 mappings may be fetched from the currently running brltty, while
more complex scripts would be handled by gnome-braille modules.

Just an little analogy: this looks a bit like how text display evolved
in X: originally, the X server was supposed to draw all text, but
nowadays graphical toolkits render fonts themselves for allowing much
more powerful features.

Samuel