Burt,
Since you have a lot of questions I will answer them at the
appropriate
places in your message. Note that liblouisxml is still under very
active
developmenq, and I am almost the only programmer workinga on it.
Others
have contributed to documentation and to cross-platform portability.
Their questions and suggestions have helped me determine which
features
are most needed. Now to your questions.
On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 10:34:10AM +0100, Bert Frees wrote:
Hi,
I'm currently working on a Braille plugin for OpenOffice.org, as part
of a European project. I'm considering the use of Liblouisxml for the
braille translation and formatting. I have a couple of questions:
* To what extent does liblouisxml meet the BANA standard on
formatting
braille (see <http://www.brl.org/formats>) ? I notice there are a lot
of points of agreement (table of contents, page numbering, running
header, ...). But other components like tables, boxes, develloper
notes,... are not supported.
Tables are supported in what I call list-columns format. I know BANA
likes stairstep tables, claiming they are easier to read, but I
strongly
disagree. Nevertheless,
they will be supported eventually. Box lines can
be generated with the boxline semantic action. Most of the
discrepancies
can be corrected by adjusting the configuration and semantic-action
files. Qe goal is to support these standards completely, along with
the
standards of other braille groups.
* Does liblouisxml aims at a different standard?
Users in different countries are using liblouisxml with their own
formatting standards. It was designed for flexibility.
* Is it the ultimate goal to fully comply to the formatting rules of
such a standard?
I think this question has already been answered.
I am thinking of using the daisy xml format as the input for
liblouisxml.
I understand that OpenOffice produces xml files by default.
liblouisxml
can process them without conversion. I've never seen an openOffice
file,
but if I could get a bunch it would be easy to produce a semattic
action
file for them.
* The dtbook.sem file doesn't seem optimally configured. For example,
the special table of contents feature is not exploited. Also,
tablular
content is currently formatted poorly. Is this supposed to be
improved in the future?
Up to this point dtbook users don't seem to have been interested in
getting a table of contents. It would be easy to add to the .sem file.
You just have to decice where you want it and assign the
contentsheader
semantic action accordingly. In addition you can specify "contents
yes"
in the configuration file. This will produce the table of contents at
the beginning of the output. As noted above, tables are slated for
improvement.
* What are the possibilities of semantic actions ? For examle, is it
possible to produce a table of this form:
<http://www.brl.org/transcribers/session06/table2.html > by means of
semantic actions?
I think that this question has already been answered. Note that
formatting is controlled more by the configuration files than by the
.sem files.
Thanks for any feedback,
Bert
For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com
--
John J. boyer; President, Chief Software Developer
Abilitiessoft, Inc.
http://www.abilitiessoft.com
Madison, Wisconsin USA
Developing software for people with disabilities
For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com
