BRF, Braille ASCII and Unicode Braille

North American Braille ASCII

North American Braille ASCII assigns one printable ASCII character to each of the 64 six-dot cells, so a plain text file can hold braille. (liblouis project)

The letters A to Z stand for the braille letters a to z, but most other characters do not keep their print meaning. The character 1 is the cell ⠂ (dot 2), and # is ⠼ (dots 3-4-5-6), the numeric indicator. Read a Braille ASCII file as cells.

Lowercase letters mean the same cells as capitals, and the converter accepts either. “Braille is read by touch.” in Grade 2, as Braille ASCII:

,BRL IS R1D BY T\*4

BRF files

A BRF file is plain text in North American Braille ASCII that holds finished braille pages, line by line and page by page. (Duxbury Systems) BRF files made by transcription software can carry running headers, centred headings and braille page numbers, laid out on each page. (Duxbury Systems)

What our BRF download contains

The translator, the braille keyboard and the braille generator write a .brf file like this, and do nothing more:

• North American Braille ASCII, one character per cell.
• 40 cells per line and 25 lines per page. The translator uses these sizes; the braille generator lets you change them.
• Lines break at the blank cell between words. A word longer than a line continues on the next line.
• A form feed character between pages.
• CR LF line endings.
• No page numbers, running heads, centred headings or other formatting.
• Cells that use dots 7 or 8, which the engine writes for characters it has no UEB spelling for, have no Braille ASCII form. The file leaves them out, and the tool tells you how many.

That suits short texts. Books, exams and signs need a transcriber and formatting software. To keep the exact cells in a document, an email or a message, copy the Unicode braille instead.