[BRLTTY] printing unicode braille patterns on BrailleBlazer printer

[Lars Bjørndal]

Hi, Peter!

You wrote:

> To recap I have output which mixes ascii and unicode braille patterns
> and I need to print these on an ancient printer (a Braille Blazer from
> 1998) which seems to understand North American Braille Computer Code
> (nabcc). It's an 8-dot printer and the notation I'm using has a lot of
> dot 8 (i.e high bit set). The translation seems to work, i.e checking
> the dot patterns that correspond to the 8-bit characters *after*
> translation seem to match the original. I can't, however, print them.
> This is over a USB-parallel adapter. Things with dot 8 present don't
> seem to be printing correctly. A capital b (dots 1 2 7) will appear
> before each such character and frequently the printed character will
> be offset by 0x80 from the desired, as iff the high bit was being
> ignored. I suspect this is either a printer or Linux device driver
> problem  but in case anyone has either a brltty explanation or
> workaround I thought I'd try here. Any pointers very much appreciated.

I don't know your printer, but most of them has either a menu or a possibility to set parameters through sending esc codes, e.g. the esc char followed by some characters. Did you try to turn the embosser into 8 dot mode. I suppose the default is 6 dot. You may also check which character set the embosser supports.

Hope this helps.

Lars

> Dave Mielke writes:
> >[quoted lines by peter.julien.rayner at gmail.com on 2023/01/22 at 16:39 +1100]
> >
> >>Can brltty help with a mapping between the unicode braille patterns and whatever encoding this printer is using? 
> >
> >This command should do what you're looking for:
> >
> >   brltty-trtxt -6 -i en-nabcc -o en-nabcc <inputFile >outputFile
> >
> >The -6 option removes dots 7 and 8. If you'd like to keep those dots then don't use it.
> >
> >The -i and -o options specify the input and output text tables to use.
> >
> >-- 
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