[BRLTTY] possible problem or bug with 5.0

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by covici at ccs.covici.com on 2014/03/06 at 08:18 -0500]

>I again dumped a file after typing all 8 dots, that is what I did.  So I
>really don't know what is on the screen except a question mark, just
>what is in the files.

Now that I know you're using hexdump to see what the characters are, I now also 
understand the 8BC3. Again, since Intel/AMD are little endian processors, this 
needs to be read as c38b, which is the UTF-8 encoding for 00CB, and that's an 
uppercase E with a diaeresis accent. This should sound familiar as we've 
already learned that the en-nabcc text table represents an uppercase E with a 
diaeresis accent as all eight dots. I'm now assuming, therefore, that it's the 
uppercase E with a diaeresis accent that isn't in your currently selected font.

So everything is occurring as expected, including the presenting of a question 
mark on your braille device. Nothing has changed on your system, the relevant 
code hasn't changed within brltty, and yet something has changed. I'm convinced 
that the answer has to be which text table was/is being used.

If you don't specify the text table then the default is to autoselect it based 
on your system's locale. In your case, text table autoselection would result in 
the en_US text table. If autoselection fails then the built-in text table, 
which is en-nabcc (unless you've explicitly configured it), is used. It's also 
reasonably predictable that, if you're explicitly specifying the text table, 
then you'd pick either of these (en_US or en-nabcc).

So I checked out the en_US text table. In that one, all eight dots is - you 
guessed it - the section sign. So my current conclusion, which could be wrong, 
is that, while you're using the en-nabcc text table now, you were using the 
en_US text table then.

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