From: Peter Duran To: Edwin Hart Subject: braille character set Date: Tuesday, November 7, 1995 13:49 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 07 Nov 1995 13:49:09 +0001 (EST) From: Peter Duran Subject: braille character set Sender: Peter Duran To: Edwin Hart Reply-to: Peter Duran Message-id: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hi Ed, Yes, I would like to join the ISO 10646 list. Dr. Donald Job is, however, unavailable. There is in a real sense no defined set of braille characters -- just syntactic rules by which to form braille characters. The braille cell is a 2x3 matrix of dots about .4 inch high by .25 inch wide. The 64 dot patterns are matched with some of the ASCII characters. When a print character needs to be represented, some linear combination of braille characters is assigned to it. At present, there are groups attempting to generate a Unified Braille Code (UBC) to represent print symbols. This process has been ongoing for 5 years and will, no doubt, take a few more. As best as I can tell, the discussion is rather confused. One group is trying to unify the extant braille codes with as little change as possible; another is trying to represent mathematics; still another is discussing HTML and GML. Still, others are worrying about Adobe's PDF and Sun's JAVA architectures. To say the least, I'm very confused. What is cearno group has selected a well-defined character set (in print) to represented tactually. So, this is my basis for interest in the ISO list; it seems reasonable to be that character set must be selected before we can determine the needed number of dots, the length of tactile strings to be used, etc. Best regards, Peter Duran