The multilingual editor may be used to create documents in Bharati Braille with substantial ease. For the editor, Braille is another Indian script. Conversion of text into Bharati Braille is accomplished via on-line transliteration or off-line conversion. This page describes the on-line transliteration process. The off-line method uses the popular nfbtrans utility to transcribe the text into a formatted document that can be embossed.

Seen below is a screen shot of the multilingual editor displaying Bharati Braille.

  The steps involved in creating Bharati Braille output are,

1. Prepare the text in the desired language. 

2. Select the text that should be converted. Between 10 and 20 lines of text may be selected and converted to Braille by transliteration. In this example, the text is exclusively in Indian language. Any one of 9 basic Indian scripts may be used.

 
3. The selected text may be instantly changed to Bharati Braille using the on-line transliteration feature of the Editor. For this purpose, the script corresponding to Language1 in the editor menu has been associated with Bharati Braille. This applies to the earlier version of the multilingual editor. In the example shown, a copy of the text to be transliterated is made using the copy-paste feature of the editor. The pasted text is then transliterated into Bharati Braille.

  The most recent versions of the multilingual editor (2005) already include Bharati braille as a standard choice. A screen shot of the recent version supporting Braille is shown following this image.

   Braille is supported as a language in recent versions of the editor. Hence the selection can be made from the menu without having to use the other languages choice.

  In the Image below, the portion of the text blocked and selected above has been changed to Bharati Braille which is associated with Language1 in the editor language menu.

  It should be remembered that the examples given above are meant to give an idea of the simple approach to creating Bharati Braille documents. In practice, to get the Braille embossed, one must get the text in the required format conforming to standard Embossers. The text from the editor may be copied and pasted into a Word Processor (e.g., Microsoft word) and saved as a text file. Alternatively, the text will also be accepted for pasting into Duxbury Software. Embossing is now easy.

  The freely available nfbtrans utility may also be used to emboss the text file.
nfbtrans is a command line application which can be run under Linux as well. When the transcribed text includes only Indian languages, nfbtrans is instructed to transcribe the same without grade-2 transcription.

Embossing Multilingual text containing English and Indian languages. 

  The online transliteration may not be suitable if a lot of multilingual text is present in the document to be embossed. In such a case, the nfbtrans utility may be used to transcribe and emboss the file. When a document has multilingual content, different Braille transcription rules will have to be applied depending on the language. In the transcription utility, one can indicate the portions of English text to be transcribed with contractions through special tags. the nfbtrans utility will transcribe only those parts tagged this way but leave out the other portions containing Indian language text.

   To transcribe text in Indian languages, a special utility has been created. This utility, called llf2brl, will accept a file prepared by the multilingual editor and transcribe it along with embedded information which may be sent to nfbtrans for direct embossing. A separate page has been setup to explain the use of the llf2brl utility.

  In the current version of the transcription utility, contractions may not be applied to Indian language text since contraction rules are language dependent and standards are not available (yet).
 

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Acharya Logo
Spectacular view of Sun's rays as he emerges from the peaks of the Annapurna, Machpuchchare (Fish tail) range in the Himalayas. The text in Bharati Braille reads "shreyo bhuyaat sakalajanaanaam" which translates into "May all people be happy and prosperous.