[BRLTTY] Would it be easy to make compression of spaces optional?

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Michael Whapples on 2012/05/30 at 17:16 +0100]

>* What should the spacing be if the contracted Braille is shorter
>than the original text? Should the number of spaces in the terminal
>be inserted or should it be something else? I imagine the first
>option would still lead to tables being a mess, so how does brltty
>determine what spacing to use?

The default is to treat each space as a space. Some contraction tables specify 
to compress several spaces into just one, which often makes reading a lot 
easier.

>* What happens when the contracted Braille is longer than the
>original text? An example of this might be is the text were a number
>and number signs are being used.

Whether the contracted form is shorter or longer than the uncontracted form, 
brltty just translates it.

>* How should it determine whether a single space is a small column
>separation or a space between words? IE. If the contracted Braille
>were shorter than the original text and there is a single space,
>should a single space be inserted or should it be padded so the next
>word lines up where it is in the original?

I believe what you're really trying to get at is if brltty can somehow 
determine if the text is in columns, and, if so, if it can maintain those 
columns when contracting. Right now it doesn't do anything with respect to 
columns. I suppose we could add an option for this and then try to make it 
work. I don't think we'd want the default to do it because it'd probably have a 
significant extra cost.

Exactly how to do it would be quite a puzzle. Do you know of any screen readers 
which come close to getting it right?

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