Re: [Groff] Re: Formatting braille

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Let me clarify that I am assuming the existence of a text file
> produced by a pre-processor (or a human) where the ASCII characters
> represent braille cells.

This is, you assume an input file like any of the *.brf files you've
mentioned, right?

> The question is whether marking up an ASCII braille file with groff
> markup would be an effective way to format braille.

It's still not clear to me what kind of formatting you need (except
modifying the number of characters per line).  I can see the
following:

  . Centering lines seems to be the standard markup for headers and
    the like (in combination with the `.,,' marker)

  . New pages start with `^L' (ctr-l) and have the page number flushed
    right and moved into the margin by one character cell.  This very
    line is used as a normal text line but shortened in length by
    three(?) characters.

  . A new paragraph is indented by two spaces.

  . The right margin is always ragged right.

Have I missed something?  I think all those issues don't pose any
serious problems.

Formatting tables indeed will be an interesting issue, and I'm really
curious what kind of examples you'll show to us.

> If I'm understanding properly, a groff-based solution would be to
> distribute braille in a new format that includes groff markup and
> the end user could run it through groff to format it for whatever
> page size they prefer.

Yes.  It should be straightforward to add two command-line parameters
(say, -rheight=... and -rlength=...) to the groff invokation.  Is
there any other parameters which can be varied except height and
length of a page?


    Werner