[brailleblaster] More Clarifications
- From: "John J. Boyer" <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: brailleblaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2012 19:53:24 -0500
My vision is that BrailleBlaster will be able to display and edit any
flavor of xml, just as liblouisutdml can translate any flavor.
Liblouisutdml accompliishes this by using a sort of pattern-matching
virtual machine. The semantic-action files are the "programs" for this
VM. If I had it to do over again I would format them somewhat
differently. Each line would contain first the pattern, then the
"instruction", then parameters, separated by white space. Optionally,
an equals sign could be inserted between the patterns and the
instructions, so Java could accept them as properties files.
Most of the patterns are literal such as "p" "span,class,italic", and so
on. Patterns can also be XPath expressions.
The instruction is either the name of an action to be applied to the
pattern, a style or a macro.
The parameters are bits of text to be inserted between the texts
contained in the subtree of the patterns. For an example, see nemeth.sem
For BrailleBlaster, the patterns would be similar, actions would also be
similar in many cases, except that those having to do with Braille would
be dropped, and others, having to do with displaying on a screen would
be added.
This describes the display virtual machine. The edit virtual machine
would be more complex, since there are two types of editing, changing
the text in a text node and adding or deleting nodes. The former is
quite straightforward. The latter will generally require selecting the
name of a style. The definition of style will have to include the name
of the element and any relevant attribute names and values.
On other clarifications: The best way to handle text files is to use the
translateTextFile method with the configuration setting formatFor utd
This will result in an output file with text paragraphs (separated by
blank lines) enclosed in <p> tags and the Braille translation enclosed
in <brl> tags, as normal. This can then be handled by BrailleBlaster
like any other utd file.
BrailleBlaster is also supposed to handle natively brf files. When these
are recognized they should be displayed in the Braille view. The method
to use is backTranslateFile formatFor utd should also be specified.
Again the resulting output file can be handled like any other utd file.
John
--
John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer
Abilitiessoft, Inc.
http://www.abilitiessoft.com
Madison, Wisconsin USA
Developing software for people with disabilities
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