[BRLTTY] Multiple contraction tables.

[Jason White]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 01:59:08AM -0400, Dave Mielke wrote:
> I've been asked if we could make it easier for those who must use more than one 
> contraction table to switch amongst them more easily. I'm asking, therefore, 
> for syntax suggestions. Here's one I've thought of:
> 
> The -c option could accept a comma-delimited list of tables. If only one is 
> specified then the preferences menu selector would still work as it does now, 
> i.e. present all available tables. If, however, more than one table is 
> specified then the preferences menu selector would only present the specified 
> tables.

This is a reasonable design, but with one disadvantage: the user still has to
navigate through the preferences menu to change the selected table.

In the longer term, it would be valuable to have a tool that can be executed
from the shell which connects to a running BRLTTY and changes specified
configuration settings - including tables.

On a related point, I notice that, when using BRLAPI applications, I can't
switch to contracted braille as I can from the console. BRLAPI doesn't support
changing braille tables, enabling or disabling contractions, etc. I think
there should be some programmatic interface that can adjust these options,
whether part of BRLAPI or separately from it.

I recently tried Orca, and apart from other problems, the inability to switch
into contracted braille is a major limitation: reading documents, Web pages
for example, in uncontracted braille is not a solution that I could tolerate,
because I find reading contracted braille to be much faster.