[BRLTTY] The unknown-character sign (26)

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Mario Lang on 2008/11/23 at 09:37 +0100]

>During testing of the german contraction table, I notice a problem
>with our unknown-character sign, 26 (the question mark).  26 is used
>in german contracted braille as a word-contraction and as a syllable-contraction.
>As a result of this, the question mark (26) is only allowed
>at the end of a word.  Now, at sites like Wikipedia that use
>a lot of unicode hyphens and foreign language characters, it happens
>quite a lot that BRLTTY doesn't know the charcode of a character and replaces
>it with 26.  However, since 26 is so ambigious in german contracted
>braille, this leads to confusion.  My question is, can
>we make the unknown-character representation configurable from
>within contraction tables?  If no, I'd like to argue
>for 12345678 as the new representation for unknown characters.

If the contraction table doesn't define the character then the text table is 
used.

If the text table doesn't define the character then the text table's definition 
of the Unicode replacement character [\uFFFD] is used.

If the text table doesn't define the Unicode replacement character then the 
text table's definition of the question mark is used.

If the text table doesn't define the question mark then dots 12345678 is used.

Perhaps the correct thing to do is to remove the attempt to use the question 
mark and just stick with the Unicode replacement character, which, if not 
defined explicitly, will be represented by dots 12345678. Opinions?

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Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
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