[BRLTTY] [SPAM] A few loose ends

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Lee Maschmeyer on 2012/07/03 at 08:37 -0400]

>Because I'm not sure whether documents are made during the install
>process from an SVN update I went to Documents and did a `make'. Just
>wanted to be sure I was looking at the latest manual. Then I looked at
>Manual-BRLTTY/English/BRLTTY.txt.

The documentation isn't up-to-date. I decided that it was more important to 
release 4.4. The documenation will get updated as time permits.

>1. brltty-ctb is not mentioned. It still refers to ctbtest. 

Yes.

>I think some of the text in this section is obsolete. For starters, it 
>mentions the -h option but not the -H one. 

More important options, lke -r, are probably also not documented yet.

>"Correspondance" is a misspelling, isn't it?

Yes. Should be "ence".

>2. When running brltty an appropriate text table for me is picked up
>somehow. But when running brltty-ctb I get all question marks if I
>don't specify a text table. This seems inconsistent.

The text table is used in two different ways. Brltty uses the text table to 
translate a character into a dot pattern, whereas brltty-ctb uses the text 
table to select which character to use to represent a dot pattern.

The default for brltty-ctb is to write Unicode braille characters. This is the 
best default since it's language-independent. You see them as question marks 
because your selected font doesn't support them. Unfortunately, there's no way, 
at present, to directly ask a Linux console what its content is in Unicode. 
What's done, therefore, is to get the font positions of each character, and to 
look them up in the currently loaded Unicode to font position table.

>3. The brf text table is especially recommended for brltty-ctb. I
>think it would be better to recommend the use of the same text table
>that brltty itself uses. 

No. Whichever text table brltty selects for you wouldn't be portable. The brf 
text table is recommended for brltty-ctb because it causes the output to be in 
a reasonably standard format.

>The purpose of the brf table appears to be that you can read a brf file 
>without those annoying dot 7's. But brltty-ctb translates computer braille 
>into contracted braille and you don't want to translate a .brf file! I just 
>tried it and the results are ghastly.

No, Brltty-ctb translates characters, not braille, into braille.

>4. Another problem with brf.ttb is that it isn't language-specific and
>text tables nowadays are.

That's intentional. The brf text table represents a standard - not a language.

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