[guispeak] Re: Megadots versus Duxbury
- From: "George Bell" <george@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <guispeak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:47:50 -0000
Hi Don,
A very loaded question, and asked of a very biased person. What I say
here is my own very personal view, but based on being a Duxbury and
Megadots distributor in the United Kingdom. As you may or may not
know, Duxbury Systems own the source code of both products.
Megadots will work in Windows, and right up to Vista. It has many
excellent qualities. However, it was indeed based on a DOS Kernel and
has been adapted one way or the other to work in a DOS Shell in
Windows.
On the other hand, the Duxbury Braille Translator is a Windows based
and developed product. It is also mostly Unicode compliant, which
means that rule files can be, and have been, developed for non-Roman
script languages and what are called "glyphs".
In very simple terms, Unicode is a massive character set of over
40,000 characters (or glyphs) and as well as the characters we use,
includes Arabic, Greek, Indic characters, etc., and things like
Copyright, Registered and Smiley signs.
Microsoft Office and indeed all modern text processing software is
based on using Unicode now, and so in theory, one can take any of
these 40,000 odd characters and map a braille dot combination to it.
So, bottom line? Megadots will remain as is, and the Duxbury Braille
Translator will continue to evolve in Windows, and perhaps even other
platforms such as Apply MAC and Linux..
George Bell.
-----Original Message-----
From: guispeak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:guispeak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Donald L. Roberts
Sent: 15 January 2009 23:06
To: guispeak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [guispeak] Megadots versus Duxbury
I am hoping that George Bell or anyone on this list could tell me
generally what are the comparative strengths and weaknesses of Duxbury
and Megadots. I own an older version of Duxbury, specifically 10.4,
but never have used Megadots as I thought, apparently erroneously,
that Megadots was written for Ms Dos. So how do the two compare.
Don Roberts
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