Latex2Nemeth

This is the source tree for Latex2Nemeth, a tool for translating TeX files to Braille.

• Licence
• Dependencies
• Installing
• Usage

Licence

Copyright 2016-2022 by Andreas Papasalοuros, Antonis Tsolomitis.

This program is distributed under the GPL, version 3 or later. Please see the COPYING file for details.

Dependencies

In order to use the tool, you need the following programs:

1. Java

   The tool has been tested with Java 7 and Java 8.

2. Apache Maven

   Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool.

   • For Windows, download the latest version.
   • For Linux, install it from the repositories:

     sudo apt-get install maven
     

Installing

• Download Latex2Nemeth's sources. E.g. for anonymous access on SourceForge:

  git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/latex2nemeth/code latex2nemeth-code
  

• Compile Latex2Nemeth.

  cd /path/to/latex2nemeth
  mvn package -Dmaven.test.skip=true
  

• [Optional] You can compile and also run the tests with mvn package

Usage

After compiling the tool the executable jar will be located in the target/ directory,
e.g. target/latex2nemeth.jar.

A simple to way to run the tool is

    java -jar latex2nemeth.jar <tex-file> <aux-file>

Options

Examples
A simple example:
java -jar target/latex2nemeth.jar src/test/resources/com/latex2nemeth/bootstrap/mathtest.tex src/test/resources/com/latex2nemeth/bootstrap/mathtest.aux

A more complicated example:
java -jar target/latex2nemeth.jar src/test/resources/com/latex2nemeth/bootstrap/mathtest.tex src/test/resources/com/latex2nemeth/bootstrap/mathtest.aux -o ch -m nemeth -e src/test/resources/com/latex2nemeth/bootstrap/nemeth.json

An example with pictures:
java -jar target/latex2nemeth.jar src/test/resources/com/latex2nemeth/bootstrap/mathpics.tex src/test/resources/com/latex2nemeth/bootstrap/mathpics.aux

Notes

1. Input tex files must be in utf-8. If using another encoding (such as iso-8859-7)
   run first LaTeX to produce the aux file and then convert the source.tex to utf-8
   with a command such as

   iconv -f iso8859-7 -t utf-8 source.tex > source-utf8.tex
   

or using your editor. Now run "java -jar latex2nemeth.jar" as above with
source-utf8.tex as the tex file and source.aux as the aux file. If errors are
produced you need to modify the source-utf8.tex at the line indicated.
Usually the errors have to do either with non supported shortcuts for macros
(in which case replace the shortcut with the true code) or with macros that
are irrelevant to the blind (in which case remove them).

1. Braille/Nemeth output files are encoded in UTF-16.
   Convert them to utf-8 with a command such as

   iconv -f utf-16 -t utf-8 source.nemeth > source-utf8.nemeth
   

(This step will be eliminated in future releases and the output will be directly
in utf-8.)

1. To emboss the output open the produced source-utf8.nemeth in LibreOffice
   with the odt2braille plugin installed, open it as "Unicode UTF-8 encoded text"
   and emboss as usually.

2. Pictures are exported separately in text files. Currently only pstricks pictures are supported. Currently their preable is hardcoded in com.latex2nemeth.utils.Preamble.

3. In order to save space when braille pages are embossed a paragraph change corresponds
   to three spaces. Thus commands such as \ (double backslash) are transcribed as three spaces.
   However, there are cases, such as in poems, that a change of line must occur from line to line.
   To support these cases, a new latex-type command, named \latextonemethnewline
   is understood by the program, which produces a new line. So the double backslash
   at the end of each line of a poem must be substituted by \latextonemethnewline. For LaTeX to run
   smoothly a \newcommand can be introduced in the preamble, such as
   \newcommand{\latextonemethnewline}{\newline}

4. It is possible to translate TeX files using different Braille alphabets. A different Braille alphabet is encoded in a JSON file. For example, in order to translate a texfile into polytonic Greek, the command is as follows:

   java -jar latex2nemeth.jar texfile.tex auxfile.aux -e /path/to/polytonic.json

Please report issues related to erratic output to a n d p a p a s [AT] a e g e a n . g r
and issues related to the tex file handling/modifying to a n t o n i s . t s o l o m i t i s [AT] g m a i l . c o m

The project was supported by the Research Unit of the University of the Aegean (project 2625).