Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Excellent point! What kind of tools are available to convert text to brf or daisy?
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The quick, cheap, and mediocre option is to use NFB-TRANS, a DOS program that will convert .txt to .brf and vice versa. Braille doesn't have bold or italic characters, but does use symbols to indicate "the following word/words are emphasized," similar to how _underscores_ or *asterisks* are used to frame emphasized words in .txt files meant to be read visually. You'd have to insert these characters manually into the .brf file, which is a pain if you're not familiar with the ASCII characters that braille characters get matched up with. Or you could buy Duxbury transcription software (not likely to be cost effective) or hire a transcriber (also not likely to be cost effective). Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I realize the .brf files are probably not worth the fuss. Braille displays and braille notetakers already have onboard conversion software that will display run-of-the-mill .html and word processing document files just fine.
I do still think that DAISY files are something you should consider including. Text-only DAISY books are close cousins to ePub. They're readable by most portable text-to-speech devices as well as desktop/laptop computers. The advantages they have over plain .html files are the multiple levels of navigation, which are useful if you want to navigate a book by part, chapter, section, etc. Of course, they're only marked up as much as the creator of the file wants them to be. Here's a page of approved DAISY conversion software packages, some of which are free:
http://www.daisy.org/tools/572%2B574...and%20Services
I am, unfortunately, just a consumer and not a producer of this stuff. I'll try to help as much as I can.