From: Abraham Nemeth
To: the S&E list
Subject: print math to braille translation
Date: August 5, 1996
Hello, everbody
It will come as no surprise that I am very interested in the
project whose aim it is to convert print math into Nemeth Code
braille. I would like to contribute to this project in the most
effective way I can. I am neither a software nor a hardware guru
but, through long and varied experience in teaching math and
compuarer science to sighted students for 30 years, both at the
undergraduate level and at the graduate level, and having used
braille exclusively for preparing and delivering my lectures, I
know intimately what the possibilities and the limitations of
braille are.
As some of you may know, I have continued to refine the
Nemeth Code for my personal use since the 1972 official version
was approved by BANA and published by APH. I regard the version
that I currenarly use to be a significant improvement over the
official version. No one who already knows the official Nemeth
Code would have any difficulty reading the version that I
currently use after about a 15-minute orientation.
I have not put into writing the changes and extensions I have
made privately, mostly because I spend my time deferring what is
important in order to attend to what is urgent. Nevertheless, I
would be happy to share what I have done with anyone with an
interest that goes beyond mere curiosity. If the consensus in the
community of Nemeth Code users is that my private and current
version is indeed an improvement over the official version, we
should ask our programmers and software developers to implement my
private version rather than the official version. Furthermore,
when my private version is in presentable form, we should ask BANA
to adopt it as official, so as not to give the appearance of
embarking on an underground operation.
Back in 1992, I wrote a document called "ANCODE." I posted it
to the UBC Committee II list, but it never came up for discussion
in that forum. The document contained many of the changes to the
Nemeth Code that I have been using privately. However, it was not
intended to be an expository document about how to write technical
notation in braille. The intent was to present an alternative
to the UBC proposal which had the same capability as the UBC
proposal had at that time and which could be extended with much
greater ease than the UBC proposal could, based as it was on the
use of upper numbers. However, that document occupies 86K of RAM,
and I hesitate to post a document of that size to this list
unilaterally, unless I hear that enough people would like to see
it and that it would not be regarded as an unwarranted misuse of
membership privilege.
I also have developed a method by which computer notation is
just a subset of my private Nemeth Code, so that a separate
computer code is unnecessary. But this posting is not the place
for such details. I look forward with keen interest in following
the development of this project and participating in it when I can
be of help.
.
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