ok. considering the design, I had originally thought it was from the late 19th century. my bad!.
still, the thing was definitely over engineered. I can't honestly say the same thing about the newer, lighter plastic models. what I find disturbing is this: the newer plastic manual brailler is prone to break and wear out far sooner and it still costs more than the old steel framed all metal unit. it would be interesting to take one of those old steel units, make a couple of modifications (such as a serial interface and a 6 pin actuator as well as a carriage motor and turn one of these things into a low cost embosser. btw, an actual braille embosser (a monster braille printer) costs about $10K. now that I have strayed from the topic a bit, lets get back on it. converting man page format to ordinary text or even PDF or HTML seems easy enough (I had to use a command provided on here earlier to convert man doc(7) to a PDF and get it via sftp and read it locally. the PDF format was easy to deal with in my local PDF handler. I also have a braille I true type font installed here. so, if I chose to send it to another document for printing on a braille embosser, there wouldn't be any transcription errors. one additional benefit of the braille font, an ordinary person can't read it unless they know it by sight or have a translation table handy. thats cheap security on my mac, but its effective (except against a mac pro who knows exactly is in the menus that can set the font). now, I don't know if there is a braille virtual interface included with bsd.rd. if not, how hard would it be to compile one in? at least then, there would be another available method for someone like me to be able to install with little or no assistance (the first 2 being either a serial interface or a virtual frame grabber that has a built-in ssh server and network connection) -eric p. I hope I am not ranting too much. :) On Jul 29, 2012, at 9:50 AM, Wojciech Puchar wrote: > such a device, possibly redesigned in modern way+electronic that would automatically control it and you get braille tty. > > On Sun, 29 Jul 2012, ropers wrote: > >> On 29 July 2012 02:48, Eric Oyen <[email protected]> wrote: >>> the old steel perkiness brailler >> >> For the record: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perkins_Brailler
