[BRLTTY] The unknown-character sign (26)

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Mario Lang on 2008/11/24 at 15:59 +0100]

>I think in 6-dot uncontracted text-table world, the question mark
>approach is OK, because in that world the user assumes every
>char on the screen consumes one cell.  In contracted braille however,
>the user knows what they read does not correspond to
>whats on screen in terms of character width.  That, and the
>fact that contracted braille overloads so many symbols allows/requires
>us to break with the question mark idiom at least for some languages.

If we assume that most contradtion tables use six dots then we should be okay 
with the default unknown character being all eight.

>Two approaches are left IMO, either we break out of 6-dot world in
>a contraction table and define something with dot7 or dot8 or both
>so that it is obvious to the user that something special is going on,
>or we define the unknown character as something like a valid question mark
>in contracted braille.  In german that would be 6-25 I think.

What do you think about presenting an unknown character as its escape 
sequence?

What do you think about eliminating the text table as a fallback and insisting 
that the contraction table define all of its characters?

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