About This Release

  While not at the 100% point, Convert::Braille does a
  good bit and offers a starting point for anyone getting
  involved with Braille processing.

Why Convert::Braille?

  Born out of my own need when working with the visually 
  impaired to translate lingo "Z is 1356" into a meaningful
  character code.  As everyone should be migrating to 
  Unicode, this package offers conversion between ASCII
  encoded Braille and the Unicode specification.

What This Package Can Do

  Convert a string between:

  Braille-ASCII <=> Unicode
  Braille-ASCII <=> Dots
           Dots <=> Unicode

  Unicode here means "UTF-8" encoded text.

  8 dot Braiile in Unicode is convert into 6 dot Braille
  by simply stripping off the dots -there is probably a
  better solution that can be applied based on the context
  of dots 7 and 8. 

  Convert::Braille::Ethiopic is complete and requires
  Convert::Number::Ethiopic.  Perl 5.8 is recommended
  for this module.

What This Package Can NOT Do

  This package can not convert between Braille-ASCII and
  English -which look a lot alike in the alphabetic range,
  but thats about it.  Only character codes are converted,
  no semantic checking is performed.

What Next?

  I intend to work on conversion for Braille implementations:

    Convert::Braille::English   (started, need definitive info)
    Convert::Braille::Ethiopic  (done!)
    Convert::Braille::Japanese  (not started)

  Ethiopic and Japanese both use multi char Braille sequences
  to represent their systems of writing which presents some
  interesting challenges.

  ...the code will be commented, etc...

More Info

  Traditional 6 dot Braille provides 63 printable sequences.
  Few of the Braille fonts I could find on the Internet, which
  are supposed to use Braille-ASCII, have the full repertoire
  or are even compatible with one another.  Very confusing...

  This module was developed with Braille-ASCII information
  presented here:
  
  http://www.uronramp.net/~lizgray/ascii.html
  http://www.cc.utah.edu/~nahaj/ada/braille/braille-ascii.ads.html

  It is also inspired by Convert-Morse-0.03. 

  See examples/demo.pl.