[BRLTTY] Major improvements to the German contraction table

[Mario Lang]

Sebastian Humenda <shumenda at gmx.de> writes:

>>In case you read german contracted braille, you should give the de-g2
>>table a second try.  I've roughly halved the estimated error rate
>>in the past months.
>
> Having tried the liblouis table recently, BRLTTY's table looks, thanks to your
> work, much more mature. Where should I report issues to?
> For instance, with latest master, "Beschwerden" misses out on the "en"
> syllable contraction at the end.

Good catch!  I just submitted PR #452 to fix it.

Please send words like this to my email, mlang at blind.guru.
If you find more things, please consider batching reports up, maybe once
a week or so, to make processing easier.

>>I ran a list of 2 million german words
>>through RTFC and am slowly, but steadily, working my way through the
>>differences.  I started at 140000 words which are different
>>between BRLTTY and TRFC, and now we only have 72000 words left to look
>>at.
>
> An ambitious endeavour, indeed. Thanks!

You're welcome.  Its a fun editing task, and it kind of resembles
crossword puzzles after a while, so it actually has some entertainment
value.

> Can anyone enlighten me why BRLTTY and liblouis have departed for braille
> contraction? Off-list is fine, I don't want to make anyone unhappy.

I don't have a full story.  IIRC, John was aiming for features we
actually dont have, like backtranslation.  The directives available in a
table are very similar though, so it is at least easy to learn from
eachother...

> I'm using cups-filters for braille embossing and their, liblouis is the
> default translation engine.

Well, liblouis is/was the default for many things.  However, at least in
german, that didn't work out.  JAWS replaced it with RTFC, and Apple
also did.  Simply because LibLouis german contraction is rather
unfinished.  And, if you use backtranslation, which is what most braille
keyboard input people want, things are getting even weirder.

> As a remark, it would be helpful if brltty-ctb could be advertised more in
> README's and on the website. It took me a while until I dug out / remembered
> which program would do the translation for me.

I am not sure how we should fix this.  BTW, we also have things like
brltty-clip and brltty-ttb, which can come in handy at times.

-- 
CYa,
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