Listing 1.
Sample Text in Braille
Sean M. Burke with Sheri Wells-Jensen

Braille Contractions and Regular Expressions
The Perl Journal, Fall 1999

Sample Text in Braille

The first paragraph of Chapter 3 of Sincair Lewis' Babbit:

It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires.

sample text in braille

Under each Braille line is the "Braille ASCII" version - simply the Braille characters mapped onto 7-bit ASCII codes. You'll notice that the character mapped to "5" is the contraction "<en>"; the character mapped to "/" is the contraction "<st>"; and the the character mapped to "," means "the next word is capitalized" when it precedes a word, but on the inside of words, it's a prefix for particular abbreviations (e.g., it plus "y" means "-ally").

The e-text of all of Babbit is 717K unencoded (ASCII), and 581K encoded (grade-2 Braille, in Braille ASCII) - a size savings of 19%.


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