[BRLTTY] Windows First Run

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Oriana Neulinger on 2019/10/26 at 13:53 -0400]

>now we're getting serial data in the log. Is this the
>expected output from the program?

Yes, it looks good.

>Unfortunately we're still getting the nonsense characters "eet" on the Alva
>544 braille display. (Display shows boot message properly.)

The "eet" actually does mean something. I'm guessing that it's showing up in a
different place than (probably to the left of) the BRLTTY banner. Those three
cells are what are known as status cells. Their conetent can be changed, but
the default for an Alva is to use the old (ancient?) style used by the original
Alva DOS driver.

The first status cell shows the position of the cursor within the current
window. The second status cell shows the position of the leftmost column of the
braille text cells within the current window. The third status cell shows the
type of information that's being shown within the text cells.

Simplest things first: The third status cell contains the letter t, which means
that text from the current window is being shown within the braille text cells.
In your case they're (almost) all blank, which means that brltty "thinks" that
the line on the scfreen where the cursor is is blank. The packets actually show
that dots 7 and 8 (the two in the bottommost row) of the first text cell are
raised. Those dots are showing where the cursor is.

Now for status cells 1 and 2. An underlined (dots 7 and/or 8) alphabetic
representation is being used to render a coordinate within the current window:

The letters a through y mean lines 1 through 25. If the letter blinks slowly
(on for half a second, off for half a second) then it means lines 26 through
50. The faster it blinks, the higher the 25 line range. Since your log shows
the letter e blinking once per second, that means the 30th line.

If neither dot 7 nor dot 8 is raised then the text cells are at the start of
the line. If dot 8 is raised then they're one display width to the right, if
dot 7 is raised then they're two display widths to the right, and if both are
raised then they're three display widths to the right.

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