About this service
What do I get?
- Braille as text (.txt): Unicode braille characters (⠃⠗⠁⠊⠇⠇⠑). You can copy them into any document; they are shown as dots with most fonts.
- BRF file (.brf): braille ASCII, the format braille embossers and braille displays read. Each braille cell is one ASCII character.
- Image (SVG and PNG): the braille dots, e.g. to print or to show. The SVG can be scaled to any size without losing quality; for long texts with a large font size there is only the SVG.
- Mirror image (SVG and PNG): the same, flipped horizontally. Useful for punching the dots by hand from the back of the paper.
The result page also shows the braille, as braille dots and as braille ASCII, and short results as an image. The files are deleted from our server after about 20 minutes.
What does "Format the output" do?
Without it, every line of your text becomes one line of braille, however long it is. With it, the braille lines are broken between words so that they have at most the given number of cells; this applies to all results. The BRF file is also split into pages of the given number of lines (with a form feed), as braille embossers expect. Most embossers support 34–37 cells per line and 25–28 lines per page.
What do grade 1 and grade 2 mean?
Grade 1 (uncontracted braille) writes every letter as one braille cell. Grade 2 (contracted braille) uses abbreviations for frequent letter groups and words, which makes the text shorter. Not every language has a grade 2 table.
Why don't you support all Grade 2 Contractions?
Some Grade 2 Contractions require a text understanding that a machine can't have. For example, the combination "wh" can be replaced by one character in grade 2, but not when the word is combined of two words. So a(wh)ile is OK, but ra(wh)ide is not.
Credits
This tool uses liblouis for the translation.