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[Summary page in sourceforge][Talp on-line]

Talp(mat)

This project is dedicated to my friend Robert Bernades who show me programming was not so different from ZX-81 and MSX BASIC.

Overview

Although there are some programs that translate from ASCII (or MathML) mathematical texts to Braille, we only know Braimat for Spanish Braille. And it is not multiplatform. For other languages see Duxbury Systems's (proprietary software) or mmbt or mml2b or BraMaNet (free software). Lambda is suposed to convert from ASCII and MathML to Spanish six-dot mathematical Braille but nowadays it is still beta.

Talp(mat) is the inverse program of Blat(mat): it converts from scientific calculator-style ASCII to Spanish mathematical six-dot Braille code.

For instance, it takes an ASCII file like

Las ecuaciones de la forma `ax^2+bx+c=0` tienen por solución
`x=(-b+-sqrt(b^2-4ac))/(2a)`.
	

and translates it into

{las ecuaciones de la forma \_ax1#b+bx+c=#j_\  tienen por soluci0n
\_x=2-b+:-652b1#b-#d@ac||*2#b@a|_\ .
	

This file can be read with a Braille line device or a Braille Lite

License

Talp(mat) is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL, version 2).

Download

You can download the last release from SourceForge.

Technical issues

Talp(mat) is multiplatform

Talp(mat) is a perl script, so it should work perfectly on any platform in which perl is installed. It has been tested on GNU/Linux (Debian Woody and SuSE 9.0), Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), Win98 and WinXP.

Installation

If you have perl, just copy all files in package into a single directory.

Usage

Just write

perl talp.pl [-l ca|es] [-c iso|cp850|utf8] INPUT_FILE [OUTPUT_FILE]

if you omit the name of the OUTPUT_FILE, talpmat will create a file with the INPUT_FILE name and .bra extension.

Input files must be plain ASCII files with math expressions written as Peter Jipsen's ASCIIMathML requires. The goal behind this choice is write once and get a Braille version with talp(mat) and an HTML/MathML one with ASCIIMathML.

Option -l indicates if text is written in Catalan or in Spanish and option -c if ASCII characters beyond 127 are coded with ISO-8859-1(5) or 850 code pages. For example if you wrote a file (for instance intmult.txt) in Spanish and saved it with "code page 850" the command will be

perl talp.pl -l es -c cp850 intmult.txt intmult.bra

If you don't know, omit this option and let talp(mat) guessing.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Noemí Sanchis for her questions and comments which contributed to improve this program. I would also like to thank Marisa Botella for her help with the English version of this web.

Specially, I would like to thank José María Villar from ONCE (Spanish Organization for the Blind) and Domingo Martínez from University of Alicante's CAE (Support Center for Students) for their support; while testing blat(mat) they convinced me to begin talp(mat) development.

And, last but not least, thanks to Quico Saval without whom this project would never have begun.


This project is hosted by SourceForge.net

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