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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

The Braille symbols are used as subpixels, not for their meaning. It’s a convenient way to basically have 8 pixels (2x4) per display character.

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I did something similar with ROSshow: https://github.com/dheera/rosshow

I created a Python library for the Braille graphics part: https://github.com/dheera/python-termgraphics

Thank you for this. We used rosshow in our robotics lab at university.

This is a total tangent, but it might be interesting to scrape map output for meaningful words formed by the braille characters.

Or we just leave that to enterprising conspiracy theorists, as a new kind of "backwards masking".

I am fully aware. Please reinterpret my statement knowing now that I know that.

Ah, I thought your original comment was referring to using the corresponding letters for the Braille (semantically), but now I guess you're probably unable to see it because your terminal doesn't have the Braille fonts (or doesn't have UTF-8 support?). I guess it would be possible to hack the code (it's just JS running under Node) to change the output character set; the challenge (as usual with ASCII) is to pick a character set that looks good.

But honestly, it's not as if using 7-bit ASCII will make it any more "readable"; more compatible, possibly, but the use of Braille subpixels definitely makes the map look visually nicer.

> I thought your original comment was referring to using the corresponding letters for the Braille (semantically)

It was. You're overthinking this. I want to see what the braille reads like.

That's a strange request, along the lines of wanting to know what your mp3s spell if you just converted the encoded data into whatever characters the drama happens to encode.

Ah, well, your original comment was a little unclear there, so apologies for the confusion.

Unfortunately most of the characters won’t map onto any Latin letter. Typical English Braille only uses the top 6 dots - but as a display character, this program uses all 8 dots. I’m not even sure which Braille dialects use all eight dots. As another commenter hinted at, it’s a bit strange to ask what the semantic meaning of graphical display characters are - a bit like reading out the characters in a binary file which happen to correspond to ASCII values. (Like, what might happen if you open a binary file in a text editor).

> I’m not even sure which Braille dialects use all eight dots.

I'm aware of two dialects, Gardner-Salinas [1] and Kantenji [2]. And they are different in to which direction 6-dot brailles are extended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardner%E2%80%93Salinas_braill...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille_kanji

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