[BRLTTY] Looking for a program to translate braille files between different text tables

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Alastair Irving on 2009/01/28 at 21:21 +0000]

>I have several braille files which use the German text table to
>represent the different braille cells.  Thus to read them I have to
>switch brltty to the text.de.tbl table.  This is rather inconvenient so
>I was wondering if anyone knows of a program which can translate between
>different text tables.

brltty-3.10 contains a tool called tbltest which has a -t option which causes 
it to do exactly what you're looking for. Tbltest doesn't get intalled so you 
need to build it from the 3.10 tarball. It functions as a filter and is invoked 
like this:

   tbltest -t input-table output-table <input-file >output-file

For example:

   tbltest -t de brf </path/to/german-file >/path/to/brf-file

In the development stream, which shall shortly become 4.0, tbltest has become 
ttbtest. The -t option has been dropped from ttbtest because it didn't seem to 
make as much sense within a Unicode-based environment. It can still be put 
back, of course, if we perceive that there's a need for it. Now would be a very 
good time to ask for it since 4.0 is not very far off.

What do you people think? Should the -t option be added back to ttbtest? In 
other words, do we want to retain the ability to translate a file from one 
braille representation into another? When thinking about it, remember that 
there's no longer necessarily a one-to-one correspondance being as the tables 
are now Unicode-based. Also, although a lot of the tables which have been 
converted from a local character set to Unicode still have a unique braille dot 
combination for each character in the local character set, the newer ones 
don't. This means that it may no longer be reasonable to think of a file as 
containing characters in some given braille representation, unless, of course, 
either the actual Unicode braille characters or a standard like brf is used.

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