Braille Alphabet Generator

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Download here. While downloading is always free, your donation is always appreciated.

What is Braille Alphabet Generator?

Braille Alphabet Generator generates fully customizable image files for Braille characters. Braille is a tactile system that, obviously, these image files are not. The audience of this project are the partially or fully sighted Braille learners. Although there are many sites that attempt to teach Braille for a specific language (US-English, for example), at the time of this project (Dec 2013), the author did not find a single site that focuses on the Braille alphabet itself and lets user create or download it. This project is aiming to fulfill that gap.

A suitable understanding of this project would require a basic background of what Braille system is. Braille characters are represented by presence or absence of 6 'dots'. These dots, named 1 through 6, can represent 2⁶ or 64 characters including one where no dot is present at all. This project produces these characters as GIF or PNG format.

Note that, the Braille characters are themselves independent of the language that they represent. The same character set can represent almost all written languages or variation of the same language (US versus British English, for instance) of the world as long as the reader knows which language the character set is representing. Accordingly, the output of this project can be used for any language a Braille article represents.

Similarly, the character set remains unchanged for various grades of Braille system within one language.

Project Details

Distribution

This project is distributed as an open source repository under Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).

Download source

You can download sources in tar+gzipped from here. Use 'tar -zxvf ...' command to ungzip and untar.

Language

The code is written using Perl and its GD library. It is tested with Strawberry Perl 5.14.

Directory structure of the downloaded tree

Once uncompressed, the downloaded source will create a directory named brailleAlphabetGenerator. It will also create the following subdirectories under this directory.

doc: Documentation directory.
- index.html: this file.
- style.css: CSS stylesheet for this file.
- anim.gif: small animation for all characters.
code: Home of the Perl code.
- defaultParams.pm: Perl package for defining the image parameters. User must change the parameters in this file and in this file only to customize any need.
- brailleAlphabetGenerator.pm: Perl package for the generation of Braille characters. Do not change this file.
- test.pl: Example Perl test program for generation of one, many or all Braille characters. User can customize this script to suite his/her current needs.
charImages: Gallery of the images developed with default values of parameters. See the section Image Gallery below.

Example Usages

$isSuccessful = brailleAlphabetGenerator::brailleAlphabetGenerator(@listOfDotChars);

where,
$isSuccessful is user-defined variable in user code. It is 1 upon successful completion.
@listOfDotChars is an array of strings that the user wants to get images for.

Serial Number	Code	What does it mean
1	my @testArray = ('all'); &brailleAlphabetGenerator::brailleAlphabetGenerator(@testArray);	Generate all characters. 'all' is a special string.
2	@testArray = ('1234', '135', '246'); &brailleAlphabetGenerator::brailleAlphabetGenerator(@testArray);	Generate dot characters: 1234, 135 and 246.
3	@testArray = ('0'); &brailleAlphabetGenerator::brailleAlphabetGenerator(@testArray);	Generate the blank character. '0' indicates the blank character.

Customization

User can customize the following characteristics of the generator.

Variable	Definition	Default value
$destImgDir	Destination image directory	'../charImages'
$isGif	Is GIF or PNG?	1
$width	Dimension	19
$height	Dimension	27
$vertMargin	Margins (from edge to the nearest center)	5
$horizMargin	Margins (from edge to the nearest center)	5
$bg_R	Background color - red component	255
$bg_G	Background color - green component	255
$bg_B	Background color - blue component	255
$fg_R	Foreground color - red component	0
$fg_G	Foreground color - green component	0
$fg_B	Foreground color - blue component	0
$radiusSkip	Radius of an empty dot position in pixel	1
$radiusDot	Radius of an existing dot position in excess of an empty dot position (in pixel)	4

Image Gallery

Downloading Image Gallery

The image gallery with default parameters is part of the standard download of this release. See Download section above.

Naming Conventions

The images are named as per the dots present in that character. For instance, 346.gif represents the character that has dots 3, 4 and 6 present.

Gallery with Default Parameters

Here is the image gallery of the Braille characters generated through the default setting of the program.

blank	1	2	3
4	5	6	12
13	14	15	16
23	24	25	26
34	35	36	45
46	56	123	124
125	126	134	135
136	145	146	156
234	235	236	245
246	256	345	346
356	456	1234	1235
1236	1245	1246	1256
1345	1346	1356	1456
2345	2346	2356	2456
3456	12345	12346	12356
12456	13456	23456	123456

Bug Reporting

Bugs can be reported here.

Your Generous Donation is Much Appreciated

While downloading this program is and will be always free, your donation is always appreciated. The suggested amount is $20, but any amount that you can afford will be gladly accepted. Please click on the icon below to donate.

Author

Swapnajit Mitra is the author and maintainer of this project.