One thing that would help here is to set the vocabulary a bit more
precise. We are talking about TWO different concepts of page-numbering here:
print-page-number
braille-page-number
A publication in Braille, in general, contains BOTH numbers. A braille
reader should know all the time - in what print page - the particular
content is located, because of reference resolving and other similar
problems. A case frequently cited is of a teacher that says "lets open
the book on page 75 ..." - the pagination in braille does not follow the
pagination in print.
I have been demonstrated once the complexity of using an Index in a
Braille scientific publication and it is rather substantial because once
you are interest in a word, for example "manifold" you have literally to:
- go to the TOC
- locate the Index
- go there and locate the word "manifold"
- read the print-page-number
- locate in the book the physical pages of that printed-page
- locate the definition of manifold - looking possible in more that
one page
To place the "print-page-number" in the body of the text is simple and
done all the time. One can basically place the print-page-number
anywhere you need on the page - reserving a space for it on the bottom
line, is just one of them.
To make a braille edition "know" know the print-page-number is much
harder ... and possibly what Eitan was working on ...
For detail on page-numbering location in Braille see:
http://www.brl.org/transcribers/session04/pages.html
Paulo Ney
On 10/25/2011 6:31 PM, Susan Jolly wrote:
Dear Professor Hammond,
Thank you for the detailed response.
Let me attempt to re-phrase my question in a simpler way.
The overall goal is to convert existing paged print documents to braille.
There are two aspects to this process. One aspect is translating the
print
characters to the corresponding braille characters. As a very simple
example, braille does not have separate small and capital letters so
titlecase words in the print source need to be preceded by a special
braille
character that acts rather like a markup tag. But the important point as
far as this discussion is that we can consider the translation aspect
of the
process as a solved problem.
Braille is typically represented using a transliteration to ASCII
characters
so a document that has been translated to braille looks similar to a
plain
text file.
The second aspect of the process of converting a print document to
braille
is to format the braille file by doing such things as indenting
paragraphs,
centering headers, and paginating.
The problem which I apparently haven't explained clearly is that
according
to the pagination standards, braille documents do not have separate
headers
or footers. Page numbers are simply appended to the first and/or last
lines
of the ordinary (what I called body) text on each page. These lines
must,
of course, be slightly shortened to accommodate the page numbers plus a
space or two to separate the text from the page number.
So my first question is whether one could use LaTeX to paginate an
ordinary
plain text document (not necessarily braille) without using headers or
footers but rather with the correct page numbers included at the
beginning
or end of the first and/or last lines of the text on each page?
Susan Jolly
--
Paulo Ney de Souza
University of California, Berkeley
