[BRLTTY] What is the best way to deal with Unicode characters?

[Aura Kelloniemi]

What follows is a long answer to Dave's question, that most likely is not
interesting to an average reader. Be warned.

Dave Mielke <Dave at mielke.cc> writes:
 > [quoted lines by Aura Kelloniemi on 2019/09/19 at 14:33 +0300]
 > >In my opinion the best that can be done now is to use a custom contraction
 > >table to get multi-cell characters. It is complicated to set up, but should
 > >work. 

 > What's the complication? Is defining your own contraction table really that
 > complicated, or is it actually something else like wanting to use computer
 > braille text tables augmented by multi-cell (contraction) definitions (i.e. a
 > text table that can include a contraction table)?

I would need to translate my text table into a contraction table completely,
because I need to enable the use of 'Six dots mode' in BRLTTY or the
contraction table is not used at all. My normal text table relies heavily on
use of dots 7 and 8, and thus enabling 'Six dots mode' makes almost all text
unreadable for me.

(In case you are interessted, I use a text table which has all lowercase
letters and special symbols been dropped down one braille line—thus e.g.
lowercase t is represented by dots 3567 and it turns into a lowercase j, if I
enable 'Six dots mode').

So my contraction table needs to hold an entry for every character that is
defined. Then if I occasionally need to use a system where multi-cell
representation is not desired (e.g. when reading columnated text or tables), I
need to use my old text table for that. This means that I would need to
maintain two translation tables.

If I use contraction table for everything, I also lose the possibility to use
brltty-ttb for editing the table, which has been quite convenient.

Finally I would need to convert my (big) text table into a contraction table.
It may well be that a simple sed script cannot do that (depending on whether
contraction table file format supports \x and \u escapes or not).

-- 
Aura