[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: Mac drivers for common embossers?
- From: Rich Morin <rdm@xxxxxxxx>
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2015 16:30:33 -0800
On Oct 30, 2015, at 7:23 PM, Gregory Kearney <gkearney@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There is, however, a serious problem with the embedded liblouis approach
used by Index. ... The Index method involves a special print driver that
pulls the text from a document, sends that text to liblouis inside the
embosser and then sends the translation made directly to the embosser.
The user has no opportunity to correct any errors either in translation
or in formatting.
On Oct 30, 2015, at 18:12, Cheryl Homiak <cahomiak@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But you are right; it would be much more useful if one could edit
the file - then it would be wonderful! When this program was first
introduced I had visions of printing Bibles in all sorts of languages
almost effortlessly if an appropriate file was available for translation;
that vision could easily become reality if a step for editing was provided.
The only problem I have in El Capitan is that I cannot print out braille
files using Index Print; it appears the printer is being treated as a
generic postscript printer when i try this and the result is either
gibberish or no printing. I agree that options are needed for various
braille embossers. Very definitely.
Sadly, we can't specify the formats in which documents are produced. So,
we might be faced with anything from unstyled, unstructured text to LaTeX
or MS Word documents. This is a really nasty problem, in the general case;
however, some useful (if partial) solutions are already at hand.
In particular, it is possible to process many formats into EPUB (a standard
format for ebook publication). EPUB documents are editable both by humans
and machines, yet retain a lot of structural and semantic information. The
Bookshare project, in particular, welcomes EPUB documents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookshare
An EPUB document is basically a Zip archive of a (slightly odd) web site.
It contains metadata (eg, an index) and a slew of CSS and XHTML files:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
So, while we're asking for ponies and unicorns, what I'd like is an Open
Source tool suite for transforming EPUB documents into tangible media of
various sizes, shapes, and material composition. Fortunately, we may not
be all that far away from a basic pipeline. Here's a (SciFi) design; I
have no idea how hard it would be to plug all these pieces together:
Preprocess the XHTML files, using XSTL.
Translate into Braille, using liblouis.
Edit the CSS files, using a text editor.
Feed the document to an embosser.
So, while we're not quite at the stage of a one-button translation and
embossing system, we might be close to having a publishing pipeline that
can be made to work by sufficiently motivated individuals.
Can some more knowledgeable folks provide advice and suggestions on the
high-level details and possible gotchas? (ducks)
-r
--
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin rdm@xxxxxxxx
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume San Bruno, CA, USA +1 650-873-7841
Software system design, development, and documentation
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to
http://liblouis.org
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