Re: nfbtrans conversion

  • From: Steve Jacobson <steve.jacobson@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2011 18:14:11 -0500

John,

I can try to take a look at the results of the "save" from word and the
semantic-action file to see if there is anything obvious.  However, in
one document, it appeared that XML tags that were not in the file caused
words to be split up with blanks inserted.  I would assume that unknown
XML tags should be completely ignored.  

What strikes me about your original posting of the goals for this
project is that it is awfully ambitious consider the nature of the
resources you have available.  Yet, you seem to already have something
that is quite good in the LibLOUIS and LibLOUISXML part of this project. 
Would you consider thinking about a less ambitious intermediate goal
that might get this work into the hands of more people and thereby peak
interest?  It would be a very rare user who would take the time, for
example, to fix up the Semantic-Action file, so they're just going to
write this off until things are further along.  Yet, some exposure to
more people might increase the chance of finding additional resources.  

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 04:27:20 -0500
"John J. Boyer" <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Steve,
> 
> Thanks for the clarifications and for promoting liblouis and 
> BrailleBlaster. The problems you are having with Word documents could be 
> largely resolved by updating the semantic-action file that handles the 
> Word xml output. A better approach might be to use the Daisy-in-Word 
> plugin, which woould give better output for the current xml2brl program 
> to work with. This is being replaced with a much more capable file2brl 
> program. Eventually, all of this will be packaged in BrailleBlaster.
> 
> What BrailleBlaster needs most urgently is funds to hire an experienced 
> Java programmer. i have one in mind. But there are plenty of experienced 
> programers on this list who could help as volunteers. We need C 
> programmers as well,to work on the liblouis suite of software. Not 
> least, we need technical writers to produce good documentation and 
> tutorials.
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> On Thu, Jul 07, 2011 at 10:32:16PM -0500, Steve Jacobson wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > In many ways, I regret having brought this up, although I certainly do
> > appreciate the help.  I want to provide a little background that might
> > make a number of things clearer and thereby respond to several notes. 
> > NFBTRANS started as a Pascal
> > program perhaps thirty years ago that was run under DOS written by a
> > staff person of our organization for internal use.  There was a period
> > when it was available commercially but this didn't seem to be the route
> > to take so the source code was released.  As I understand it, it was
> > converted to C using a pascal-to-C converter and many, many enhancements
> > were made by mostly one volunteer.  I suspect that the code of most
> > programs that have been around for that long is not terribly neat.  Also,
> > it is my understanding that the assembly code was not required in all
> > cases but only when compiled under certain compilers.  That was the case
> > many years ago and may not even be the case today at all, I don't know
> > for certain about that.
> > 
> > There is a lot that could be done with this code and this software in
> > general, but my purpose in providing information on it was specifically
> > to get it running as it is under 64-bit systems.  There was a PowerBasic
> > front end that was known as WINBRL that provided a GUI interface. 
> > However, there is no further development there, either.  It is my
> > opinion that any effort to make major changes to the code would be
> > better placed toward the furthering of John Boyer's Braille Blaster
> > project.  This is really pretty complicated software, especially when
> > going from text to contracted braille where formatting commands are
> > implemented.  We may even find that a clean compile may not guarantee
> > that there are not bugs, or at least this is one warning I have received. 
> > However, if NFBTRANS could be made to work on 64-bit platforms fairly
> > easily as appears might be the case, it would fill a short term gap for
> > many of us until something better and more modern in its design comes
> > along.  This could be Braille Blaster, or maybe even something else
> > built upon the LibLouis work.  In the meantime, I am very grateful to
> > those who have worked upon this over the years, and the funny thing is
> > that when I translated a file and got the results I wanted, it just
> > never dawned upon me what the code looked like.  I well know that is not
> > the way to do development on a tightly structured project, but this
> > software never was that.  However, it worked for a long time for very
> > many people and still fills a gap.
> > 
> > John, as you know, I have looked at and like much of what is being done
> > with LIBLOUIS and think that there is a lot of potential.  I have more
> > to learn about it, but I did have some difficulty getting a nicely
> > formatted document out of Word, but I don't know for sure if it was
> > within the translator or how the structure of the document gets saved to
> > XML.  For example, hanging indents in Word did not hang in braille.  I
> > found that I had to be careful how I saved as XML, too, to avoid having
> > the text split up.  Some words had spaces within them, for example. 
> > There is more for me to understand, and I know you have more work to do,
> > so it is not fair for me to make a judgment on my very small amount of
> > experience.  I guess this is why I don't see a quick and dirty fix of
> > NFBTRANS as competing with what you are trying to do, but rewriting
> > NFBTRANS would, and I think would be a waste of time.
> > 
> > Again, thanks to everyone for the help they have given, but I would urge
> > John to give us specifics as to what he needs and maybe we can be of
> > help.
> > 
> > Best regards,
> > 
> > Steve Jacobson
> > 
> > __________
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> -- 
> John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer
> Abilitiessoft, Inc.
> http://www.abilitiessoft.com
> Madison, Wisconsin USA
> Developing software for people with disabilities
> 
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