Re: Displaying Braille online

> importantly I found many Braille fonts are inconsistent with respect to
> at what code points the non-letter Braille symbols occur, in other

If you are using this with web browsers, there is only one legal code
point for each of the 256 possible patterns, they are ⠀ to ⣿.
Anything else is abusing fonts (like the old Symbol font hack of using
m for mu).

Braille fonts should be very easy to create with any font editor, so it
is likely that some were created pre-HTML 4, and had to mis-use character
sets.  Being easy also probably means that people created them before they
really understand fonts and encodings.

Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn't have them out of the box (my Linux system,
with Mozilla, does, and while I may have installed a wide range of fonts, 
I didn't deliberately install Braille).  However, a quick Google suggests
that there are proper Unicode Braille fonts.

The other possibility, for IE, is to use font embedding.  That won't 
compromise the ability of non-IE browsers to use correctly encoded local
fonts.  I'd also imagine given a font editor, it would be quite a quick 
job to create ones own Braille font.

Received on Tuesday, 22 November 2005 22:00:46 UTC