DP Tool Club 31/CDASC_31_1996_juillet_aout.iso/vrac/nfbtr745.zip/TABLES.ZIP/TABLES.DOC

Text File | 1995-04-17 | 8KB | 179 lines

These tables were provided by Oleg Shevkun ([e-mail];
[e-mail]).

this document describes the alternative tables, now available for NFBTRANS.

The present version of NFBTRANS comes with these table files:


                BRAILLE.TAB

This is the standard table of English Braille, and it is used by default.
If you want your Braille output without any capitalization signs (the way it
is in British Braille), add line
      CA=|

anywhere in the table.


              RUSSIAN.TAB

This table produces standard Russian Braille output.

The Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet consists of 33 characters, and these need to
be assigned positions in the ASCII table.  here is a table that will permit
the brailling of ASCII files created in the so called "Alternative"
ASCIIzation system, standardized in codepage 865. This will allow working
with files created by all major DOS-based Russian word-processors, which is
the absolute majority of documents you may ever come across.  Other popular
formats, not supported by this table, are codepage 1251 (the standard
Russian character set in WINDOWS), KOI7 and KOI8 (two formats, normally used
on the Internet). If you ever need a table to work with these formats,
please contact us.

NFBTRANS may have problems in number/letter combinations.  Thus, if a number
is followed by a letter, it will put no letter sign before the letter.  You
will have to do it manually.  As an alternative, you may edit your text
before brailling, so that such letter/number combinations do not occur.
Thus, if there is a point 2B in the text, just put the B in
parenthesis, and then it will be treated correctly.

The capital sign in Russian is dots 45.  However, it is used so rarely, that
we decided not to incorporate it into the table altogether.   Thus, if for
some reason you want to capitalize a word or two (which is very unlikely),
then you can insert the capitalization sign manually. However, the table is
written in such a way, that it will put capitalization sign as dots 46 in
any Latin-letter text it comes across.  In other words, if you translate a
mixed text in Russian and English, the Russian portion will have no
capitalization marks, and the English version will have dots 46 to represent
capitalization.  Of course, no contractions will be used in the English
section.  This practice, although somewhat unusual for Americans, is in full
accordance with the norms of Russian Braille.

Please remember that the question mark in Russian (and, for that matter, in
all other languages but English) is dots 26.


                SPANISH.TAB

A few years ago, a new Braille standard was accepted in Spain.    It is this
new standard that our Spanish tables are attempting to follow.    However,
because at the time of writing the author didn't have a systematic manual on
Spanish Braille, there may be a few changes needed to these tables.    If
you find any incorrect braillings with them, please let us know.


                   ESPERANT.TAB

This  table will braille documents in the international auxiliary language
Esperanto.  Esperanto has five circumflexed consonants (c, g, h, j, and s
can all be circumflexed) and an accented vowel (u with breve).    The
Fundamento, which forms the official basis for the language, suggests that
printers that lack a circumflex can use `h' (ch, gh, hh, etc.).  This is,
however, not a completely satisfactory solution for computers, and
introduces unnecessary lexical ambiguity.  Therefore, it is not supported in
our table.

Two solutions are now in use:

The European Computer Manufacturer's Association Standard ECMA-94 contains
four 8-bit Latin alphabets to cover a variety of European languages.  Latin
alphabet 3 covers Esperanto (as well as nine other European languages).
This alphabet also forms the basis for the international standard coding ISO
8859/3 (LATIN-3).  This eight-bit coding is probably the best `canonical'
representation for the storage of Esperanto text, and so we've chosen to
support it.  The problem is that the Internet mail protocol is currently
only able to transmit 7-bit ASCII. The best ASCIIzation for communication
purposes is to represent the circumflex by an X after the character to be
accented.    This method is in common use on the Internet.  And, because
it doesn't conflict with the other method, we could incorporate it into the
same table.  If your text is transcribed in any other method, you'll have to
use a conversion program on it first.

For more information on Esperanto, please contact
Esperanto League of North America
 Box 1129
 El Cerrito, CA  94530
Phone: [phone]
E-mail: [e-mail]

For a free E-mail Esperanto-course, write to [e-mail].


                GERMAN.TAB

Our German table will produce German Braille with most commonly used
contractions.  To the Germans, this is an equivalent of Grade I (though they
don't use the term).  A Reader should be familiar with the basic
contractions for groups of letters.  If you would like no contractions used,
you should put the command ~1 at the beginning of your German documents.

In the future, we may come up with the complete table of German Braille to
handle Grade II.  Please let us know whether you would be interested in such
a project.  Also, please let us know your suggestions concerning this table.


               GNT.TAB; BHS_BHM.tab

These two tables will braille ASCII files, created by the Online Bible
software from Online Bible, Inc.  Among other things, the program contains
full Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible.  These can be printed from the
program to an ASCII file and then processed by NFBTRANS. GNT.TAB will
process Greek New Testament output, while BHS_BHM.TAB will work with the
Hebrew Old Testament.

The main limitation of the Online Bible is, that its Greek text appears
without any accents, breathing marks or punctuation.  Its Hebrew Old
Testament is a consonantal text, without any marks.  If you find any
software that will print a better version of the Biblical texts in the
original tongues, please let us know, and we'll work on a translation table
for it.

Another problem is, that the Online Bible inserts English book titles into
the text it prints, and they get corrupted in Braille when the language
tables are used.  To work around the problem, you should do some formatting
to your documents before translating them. Put this command in front of any
English text in the files created by the Online Bible:

    ~-tf=braille.tab

Put this command before any Greek text:

     ~-tf=gnt.tab

Put this command before any Hebrew/Arameic text:

      ~-tf=bhs_bhm.tab

With the exception of limitations outlined above, NFBTRANS use follows the
system found in the Greek New Testament, produced in Braille by National
Braille Association.

Wit the exception of limitations outlined above, NFBTRANS follows the system,
used in the Hebrew Bible, published in Braille by Jewish Braille Institute
of America.  Note, however, that no special signs are preserved in the
Online Bible text; this affects the representation of several letters with
the Dagesh, for which we have chosen representations that are closer to the
Latin alphabet.    The letters affected are B (Bet), K (Kaf), P (Pe).

Before using the Hebrew version, log to the directory that contains the
files (default is C:\BIBLE\BHS_BHM) and type these two lines:

       REN VERSION.DAT VERSION.VGA
       REN VERSION.CGA VERSION.DAT

This will change the behavior of the
program, so that your Hebrew text will be printed from left to right (and
this is what you need for Braille embossing).  If you ever want your text to
go from right to left, just restore the original file names.

In both the Greek and Hebrew parts of the program, you should tell it not to
format the text for printing on a page.  This is done from the window, which
is presented to you whenever you choose "Passage Print".

Please refer to the documentation for Greek and Hebrew modules of the Online
Bible for more hints.

For more information on the Online Bible, call [phone].