[Edbrowse-dev] andTranslate

[Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net>]

There is a function in format.c called andTranslate().
It takes meta-characters like &whatever; in html and turns it into
the symbol whatever.
A common example is < for the less than sign,
because a bare less than sign is the beginning of an html tag.
Every literal less than sign has to be encoded in this way.
Thus &lt; becomes <
I turn it into the character <, not the words less than or some such thing,
because every screen reader and every adapter will read the less than sign,
as you want it read, in your language.
I don't want to mess with that.
But the hiher unicodes I sometimes turn into words, English words,
unfortunately hard coded in format.c,
because screen readers may not know what to do with those unicodes.
On the other hand, more and more readers are configurable,
to render these high unicodes as you wish,
and I take that power away from the user by translating them into my own
words in format.c.

I propose that andTranslate turn every &whatever; symbol into its utf8
equivalent, and that's all.
Beyond this however, you could have in your .ebrc config file lines like

&#947 gamma

This would override the simple utf8 translation.
It would let you put in your own words if your screen reader or system
simply doesn't handle those unicodes well.
Or if you are dumping formatted html to text and would rather have it in words.
What do you think?

Of course this qualifies as a new feature, and I need not jump into it now.
We should probably continue with bug fixes and the debian confusion,
which I am very disappointed that they aren't helping us out here.
We're doing 95% of the work, and they can't come forward
with some information on how they build their libraries etc??
Well that's another story I guess.

Karl Dahlke