Since BrailleBlaster will be showing both print and Braille when a file is opened, it seems best to pass all xml files through liblouisutdml to produce a utd file. This file will then be opened and processed by BrailleBlaster. The only problem is that there may be a few seconds before it becomes available. How can this be made less unpleasant for the user? Once the utd file is available it will be parsed bby the build method in xom. I think we should time this method for a large document to see how fast it really is. It seems to me that the slow performance is really due to the walkTree method and loading stuff into StyledText. Perhaps we can load only a few screenfulls at a time, and load more as the user scrolls. Of course, when a utd file is opened the translation step is skipped. I think that utd files should be referred to in the user interface as working files, without mentioning utd. John -- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities