Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> But what does braille output 'mean', is it to a braille line-device,
> or a printer format? Lilypond is quite flexible in creating different
> output formats.
It is a convention for using Braille to describe music. The convention
is fairly complex, it evolved for very many years, long before computers
became popular. It has many aspects: purely musical artifacts (and there
are a great deal of them which may be represented), layout and organisation,
not to say textual inserts based on usual Braille, which is not an easy
thing either in itself.
The overall picture is made more complex by the fact Braille is not a single
standard, but a moving and evolving thing, with dialects and variants. You
will find people which have religious feeling towards particular variants.
Each national also induces its own peculiarities. Something notable in
Braille is that it contains various and complex compression schemes. These,
once again, evolved long before `compress' or `gzip' were invented :-).
Producing real, non-toyish Braille for music is a all of a challenge.
Even studying how to read and write Braille any seriously requires years
of steady learning, a bit like for sighted people when they are children.
It would surely be wonderful if Lilypond was able to produce Braille music.
But if you want such a project to ever succeed, it has to be tackled with
a lot of energy and breath.
--
Fran�ois Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard
