[tex4ht] Could LaTeX Be Used to Format Braille Documents?

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:31:50 -0600 schrieb Susan Jolly:

> Dear Professor Hammond,
> 
> Thank you for the detailed response.
> 
> Let me attempt to re-phrase my question in a simpler way.

> 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?

I looked at the file http://www.acb.org/downloads/bf10112011.brf.
While it is possible to identify quite a lot parts of the text (if
one compare it with the txt-file) I could find nothing that looks
like a page number. 

Also you didn't answered the question of William about the relation
of the txt and brf file. Did one of them have been generated from
the other? Or are both generated from a third source? If yes what is
this source.

Beside this: It is in normal typesetting with LaTeX not easy to
manipulate the last line of a page. But you have a fix-width font
and a plain text format. So one needs only to count the number of
lines and then to retypeset the paragraph at the page break with a
suitable parshape and add whatever you want as page number. That
shouldn't be difficult with normal latex and is probably rather easy
with luatex. 


-- 
Ulrike Fischer