[duxuser] Formatting and different embossers
- From: "George Bell" <george@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 04:30:45 +0100
Hi all,
This is a long posting, so you may either want to save and
read later, delete, or just fill up your coffee cup or beer
glass before you read on.
To understand why formatting may vary between braille
embossers, you need to try and begin to understand something
of the history of the technology. It's actually quite
simple.
Braille embosser manufacturers have to sell their embossers
into world-wide markets. Without doing this, embossers
would still cost you an absolute fortune. I remember almost
20 years ago, when a 10 cell per second embosser in the UK
was selling at around $10,000. Now you can buy one for less
than a quarter of that, which runs at 5 times the speed.
In spite of what we all believe, well over half the
embossers sold today, and even 20 years ago, go into
countries where there is no Grade 2 braille, and they print
directly out of programs like Notebook, WordPad, and even
Word for Windows. For the more technically inclined, they
are installed as "Generic/Text only" devices. They are
treated to some extent as dumb, with the embosser having the
intelligence.
20 years ago, Duxbury was still a very small company, and
virtually the only one of its kind, certainly in the Western
hemisphere. They specialised in producing software for
countries who DID use Grade 2 braille. Also as a VERY small
company, and before the PC as we know it appeared, most of
their work was for main-frame computers, installed in major
braille printing houses.
Remember that the IBM PC was only just coming into being
then.
And so braille embosser manufacturers had to devise ways in
which they could accommodate countries where there was only
Grade 1 braille.
Features like automatic insertion of Numbers signs were
built in. They devised word-wrapping, such that words would
not be split on a line. The early PC's of that age of
course were equally basic, as were text editors,
And so a culture developed with the hardware manufacturers
to build in all manner of features. So specialist and
removed from the normal ink print print market was braille,
that apart from things as basic as Parallel and Serial
connection were concerned, the similarity between ink
printing and braille printing stopped right there.
Not only that, but as we all know English braille has many
derivatives, English English and American English being just
one example where the embosser manufacturers had to provide
for.
So we had a very few braille embosser manufacturers, each
competing against one another, each in a market place the
size of a duck pond compared to an ocean of ink printers.
(Hey! That's not a bad comparison for almost 4am!) In
short, no common standards were developed.
Just ask yourself if your ordinary office ink printer now
has settings for characters per line, and lines per page?
No. You just plug it in, tell Windows what kind of printer
it is, (in fact the printer itself now tells Windows what
kind of printer it is) and away you go.
So the bottom line is that regardless of what software you
use to send text to your braille embosser if, for example,
you send a file where you have formatted for 40 cells per
line, and your embosser is set for 32 cells per line, the
embosser prints what it is told - 32 cells per line.
However, set your embosser to 40 cells per line in this
case, and you are OK.
The absence of any common control standard has caused
serious problems. When I say "common control", I mean like
things called escape codes, which tell the printer what to
do. Each manufacturer would have their own way for example,
of telling the printer how to only emboss ## number of lines
on a page, and # characters on a line.
These different codes were, and still are, a nightmare for
software developers like Duxbury.
Indeed one simple example that I was discussing only last
week when I was in Germany, was a feature which one
manufacturer calls, "Letter Graphics". It's simple enough.
Embossed print readable characters. I wanted to see the
feature now added to DBT's new version, available at least
with the two major manufacturer's embossers. It's been done
for one type of embosser, but not yet for a competitive
embosser. Why? Nobody had thought it a worthwhile feature,
so no special codes had been written to deal with it!!
So I did some head banging - and hopefully at least some
models from this manufacturer will be able to have their
internal firmware upgraded to take advantage of the feature.
But going deeper still, Duxbury faced with this kind of
problem, have not stuck their heads in the sand. (well not
quite) But they have done their very level best to stay
neutral, and be as fair as possible to all embosser
manufactures. Sadly, they have let manufacturers simply get
on with it. Rather like the tail wagging the proverbial
dog.
Well I for one am totally sick of all this. We produce
braille ourselves, and so I feel we know a modest bit about
things.
We don't want to have to re-set our embossers each time we
change size of paper. We want the software (DBT) to tell us
for example what size of paper the job was originally done
on, and automatically tell the embosser to adjust its
settings accordingly. Given we have the right size of paper
in place, it should not matter what make and model of
embosser we use. In short, no more of this going through
embosser set-ups, with complicated key pads, with or without
speech to help.
And so we are back to basics. And I mean basic basics. The
whole approach to dealing with different embossers has to
change. You need to know before you emboss, that your file
contains something that your embosser cannot handle.
Suffice to say that I'm onto everyone's case here. Embosser
manufacturers and software developers.
Don't expect miracles overnight, or even in months. But
we'll get there.
George Bell.
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