[BRLTTY] Braille in CLDR

[Samuel Thibault]

Nicolas Pitre, le Mon 29 May 2006 12:17:06 -0400, a écrit :
> On Mon, 29 May 2006, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > but asking people to use tbltest for converting tables is a
> > bit tedious.  Installing/learning Linux is already a difficult task, the
> > additionnal burden of converting tables is really not welcome.
> 
> What about people that, say, want to use a provided table but want to 
> modify one or two characters.
> 
> Right now you just tell them to open /etc/brltty/text.<whatever>.tbl 
> with their favorite editor and edit the file to their liking in a format 
> already familiar to anyone who learned braille, and save it. That's all.
> 
> How do you do that with CLDR?

You ask brltty to export CLDR's table into a .tbl file, and then you can
edit it.  Same easy thing for other projects.

> > A solution would be to write converters now, and convert all brltty
> > tables into all other formats and submit them to other projects, and
> > vice-versa from all other projects.  Now, say that a brltty developper
> > writes a braille table for a yet non-covered language.  He will have to
> > convert and submit it to all other projects, which is quite tedious.
> 
> But at least it has the advantage of not putting the burden on the user 
> if the user wants to modify tables himself.

Yes, I do agree on that.

> Maybe a converter should be available with all braille projects?

Towards every other projects' format then?

> > Why shouldn't CLDR come into play here?
> 
> Because it tends to be against the KISS principle from which BRLTTY is 
> increasingly and irrevokably getting away.  And that's really 
> unfortunate.  Now what will happen if you don't have CLDR installed?

BRLTTY maintainers can still regularly import tables from CLDR for
having them in such case.  But the key point is that collecting tables
for various languages would be centralized by CLDR.

> > I don't think the goal of Erkki is to standardize braille or replace
> > brltty/etc. tables.  It is about including the best information
> > available in a common place for every braille producer: CLDR.  Of course
> > people will always prefer their own table and that's fine.  But default
> > ones (i.e. mostly agreed on) should be as much available as possible.
> > And CLDR is really a fine way for this.
> 
> I'm not against a common pool of braille table definitions.
> 
> I however have concerns about CLDR actually being the best place for 
> this.  Sounds like pinning a calendar witha nail gun.

The "we need to have this for CLDR 1.5" sentence was probably a bit
abrupt indeed.  I hope that this is not a strong requirement.

Samuel