[BRLTTY] typing braille from the PC keyboard

[Mario Lang]

Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> writes:

> Coscell's question actually reminded me something I wanted to propose
> before releasing brltty 4.0: adding support for typing braille dots from
> the PC keyboard.
>
> This can not be configured right now because it needs support for chords
> rather that mere keypresses.

AFAICS, the major showstopper is that PASSDOTS can not be used.
Another thing that will be necessary is "modes", i.e. a command
would turn specific mappings on and off.

> Then there is an additional concern: when typing braille, the
> contraction table is not used for the translation. I know that there are
> amiguities etc, but for instance brlkey
> (http://coscell.molerat.net/brlkey-1.9.5.tar.bz2) copes with them for
> chinese.

There is yet another sort of ambiguity, namely when using unicode
based text tables, which can have several mappings for a single dot combination.

However, this reminds me of a use case I actually have, which
would be simplest to impelement first: typing unicode braille.
Further modes (text table reverse translation, and possibly contraction
table reverse translation) could be added on top of this.

> Maybe we'd need different tables for contracted output and
> contracted input.

I dont have a particular case handy, but I vaguely remember that
german at least has a few exceptions that would need natural
language processing to resolve.  OTOH, I haven't really thought
about reverse translating contracted braille yet, mostly
because I personally will never use it, my touch typing is very fast.

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