[BRLTTY] Loading several braille tables

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Shérab on 2012/08/31 at 16:54 +0200]

>> I think most (maybe all) already do include the Latin letters anyway.
>
>I'm not sure whatyour "most (maybe all)" refers to.

I'm referring to the existing tables. I think they all already do include the 
Latin letters. I said "most", however, because I'm too lazy to actually check 
all of them.

>Do you talk about tables for non-latin alphabets ?

Yes.

>> What they tend to do, though, is something like add dot 8 to the Latin letters. That's 
>> something which helps the user but wouldn't be done by a simple table
>> merge. 
>
>These two sentences I could absolutely not understand, sorry.

What many non-Latin text tables do is include the letters-latin-dot8 text 
subtable. This subtable defines the Latin letters as usual except that dot 8 is 
added to each of them. This makes the Latin letters easy to pick out as being 
represented differently than the native letters but still easy to recognize. A 
simple table merghe wouldn't mark the Latin letters in such a way.

>Well, I wouldn't mind, if there was a documented way of handling this,
>such as the first or last table loaded takes precedence.

I believe the last encountered definition wins.

>And there could even be warnings in the logs for symbols with conflicting 
>representations...

I expect that the normal case would be lots and lots of logs. I'm not so sure, 
therefore, that that's a good idea.

What you're asking for could, of course, be fairkly easily iomplemented. It 
might cause more potential confusion than it's worth, though. We've already 
seen how confusing it becomes for a user if he has more than one braille driver 
or braille device definition. Having more than one text table definition would 
probably cause even more confusion if they were simply all merged.

As I see it, Jason's suggestion of having your own super table which simply 
includes the actual ones you want is a good way to do it. If your concern is 
that uninstalling or reinstalling brltty might lose your table then there's a 
solution for that. If you start brltty as a user then you can put your own 
files in $HOME/.brltty/, and if you start it as a system daemon ($HOME not 
defined) then you can put them in /.brltty/. Note that you can even override 
any brltty-supplied data file in this way. This directory is always checked 
before the file's official location is checked.

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