[BRLTTY] printing unicode braille patterns on BrailleBlazer printer

[peter.julien.rayner at gmail.com]

Following up to an ancient email of my own. 

peter.julien.rayner at gmail.com writes:
>I have an ancient (25 years) braille printer, a Braille Blazer. It has
>an 8-dot mode which works in some sense, e.g. will braille ascii
>correctly. I want to braille a series of files with a mixture of
>unicode patterns and ascii. I'll attach an example (if the list allows
>attachments). For the curious it's a mixture of a bespoke braille
>music notation and lyrics transcribed by louis.translateString. This
>works fine on my refreshable braille display but the printer garbles
>the music and embosses the lyrics correctly. Can brltty help with a
>mapping between the unicode braille patterns and whatever encoding
>this printer is using? If not, does anyone have the mapping for the
>nonascii part?
>pointers to documentation are of course fine

Dave passed on the suggestion of
brltty-trtxt  -i en-nabcc -o en-nabcc
which almost works.
Here's an example of an original file:
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 135
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 947 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://brltty.app/pipermail/brltty/attachments/20250614/4ebfbd83/attachment.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
And here's what the above command does to it:
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: flurgle
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 685 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://brltty.app/pipermail/brltty/attachments/20250614/4ebfbd83/attachment-0001.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
When I print this, anything without dot 8 works fine, but characters
with dot 8 often print as a two character sequence. They also don't
render correctly on my refreshable braille display using orca on linux
while the original file is fine.
Anyone have any further clues here?
I'm quite curious to know what characters are actually being sent over
the USB parallel adapter I'm using for the old printer but I've not
wrung this info out of wireshark ... yet.
thanks again for any help
regards
Peter

-- 
Peter Rayner (he/him), Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne
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