alright, so I did some research and digging and basically came up empty handed
The manual suggests that using say, a tool such as lou_translate for
braille transcription is not recommended, instead it directs me to use
file2brl, which is part of liblouisutdml (which has been probably not
maintained for over 4 years now). Unfortunately, file2brl is not a
windows binary files, nor are there any compilations available. So,
curious to see how other programs implemented this (like the famous
APH send to braille shortcut) they just simply pass the file directly
to lou_translate anyway and make it write to whatEver.brl
Thing is, this program appears to work alright with only English
tables. Changing tables inside the batch script or even trying to
"cheat" the implementation by renaming whatever other table you want
to use to es-ueb-g2.ctb produces an output of 0 kb in the .brl file as
well as a non-existent log so there is just no way to see what was
wrong.
So I went and tried something like:
lou_translate es-g1.ctb <
"D:\PersonalDocs\brl\print\sampleBooklet.txt" > "F:\sampleBooklet.brl"
and well, apparently a translated file was indeed produced (sized
similarly to the original one) but then checking or trying to emboss
this directly (no translation involved from the embosser itself) gave
out a whole bunch of really strange characters, especially when
capitalization, punctuation, accents were found. I know those are
right inside liblouis because they are represented correctly using the
right dots in the character definitions file. I made sure the original
text file was also properly encoded using valid UTF8 (with notpad++)
I also made sure the code page used for my command prompt was set
appropriately. So right now, there is just no quick way to translate
files without regards to formatting. Text strings and the work do work
fine, but files do not. and I am not sure if this is just me not being
able to correctly use the command line, or if lou_translate only
outputs some kind of fixed ascii encoding (I also tried passing a
display table argument to it such as es-new.dis,es-g1.ctb) and this
just made it all worse, inserting a line break almost every word, if
not more frequently. Unicode did not work either.
whatever ideas, suggestions or information is much appreciated.
--
Juan Pablo Bello
Cel. 313-879-2884
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://liblouis.org
