Liblouis table for Norwegian

[bertfrees]

• include some official braille code specification document
• write tests based on the specification
• validate the existing braille table for Norwegian
• improve the existing table or write a new one from scratch
• include in liblouis upstream (merge?)

PR: liblouis#144

See also:

• Norwegian specifications and guidelines liblouis/liblouis#67

[josteinaj]

@usama49 has been creating tests for norwegian language based on examples in the norwegian braille documentation, and I've converted it to the liblouis test format here:

https://github.com/josteinaj/liblouis/blob/nlb-norwegian-table-corrections/tests/harness/no_harness.txt

There's still some tests missing. The tests do not succeed yet. We will talk to Lars Bjørndal about the edits we've made to the tables to make sure they're ok.

Note that we've included some markup in some of the input strings such as <em> and <strong>. I assume this is not the right way to do it though but we've used them as placeholders for now. How should we write such tests? Is this a formatting thing which we should somehow write dotify-tests for instead?

We've also gone through the table and updated it here:

https://github.com/josteinaj/liblouis/blob/nlb-norwegian-table-corrections/tables/no-no-g0.utb

• Should I make a PR from josteinaj/liblouis to some branch at snaekobbi/liblouis to move these changes over here? Or should I make a PR directly to the liblouis/liblouis master branch?
• Should the tests succeed before I create a PR?

[bertfrees]

Great job! The tests looks very thorough.

Good idea to coordinate with Lars. Because your changes are backed by the official standard you included, I'm tempted to give you the benefit of the doubt. But still it's good to talk to Lars because it's possible some differences are there because of differences in interpretation of the standard.

Where to test <em> and <strong> depends on which level we are going to implement it. It could be done in liblouis, in that case you have to include a "typeform" argument in the tests (see e.g. http://snaekobbi.github.io/liblouis-table-spec/#lenitalphrase, '1' means bold, '2' mean italic, ...). It could also be done on a higher level, i.e. in a translator that makes use of liblouis but does some additional things, usually implemented in Java or XSLT. In order to support <em> and <strong> in the German translation, Christian currently does some extra processing in XSLT before and after the liblouis translation. The reason he does that is because the emphasis support was insufficient for German and also buggy at the time he wrote his translator. But there has been a lot of work on emphasis in liblouis lately, so maybe we could try that for Norwegian.

The idea for this repository was that all of us could work together on branches without having to give everybody commit access to liblouis/liblouis. I suggest we first push your branch here, and then when it's ready make a PR to liblouis/liblouis.

I'm not sure whether all tests should succeed. It's better to have a few tests that fail instead of no tests at all. I know I have some failing tests in my files. Ideally there should be some XFAIL flag on failing tests but I don't think we have that right now. @egli WDYT?

[josteinaj]

... "typeform" argument ...

Interesting. I noticed @jukkae used typeform for some of the finnish tests but I didn't know what it was.

In norwegian braille it's not strictly defined which sign to use for em, strong and underline, so we may want to choose which signs to use based on a pre-processing step. Hopefully we can avoid it by assigning separate signs for em/strong/underline, but I'll have to consult some braille experts on the matter. In sweden they have separate signs apparently, but we don't.

The idea for this repository ...

Ok, I see. That makes sense. I'll move the branch.

Ideally there should be some XFAIL flag on failing tests

Isn't xfail only for tests that should fail? How about making a test "pending"/"disabled" instead?

[josteinaj]

I moved stuff out of my own liblouis fork and into this repository today:

https://github.com/snaekobbi/liblouis/tree/nlb-norwegian-table-corrections

https://github.com/snaekobbi/liblouis/tree/formal_braille_spec

[bertfrees]

If you say "...we may want to choose which signs..." do you mean that for different documents the same sign may have a different meaning? Are you suggesting a pre-processing step that's analyses the document and then decides which signs to use for which semantic?

Which signs to use for which type of emphasis could possibly also be specified in CSS somehow, if that would be a requirement.

XFAIL is for tests that you know are failing because of some known bug e.g., and for which you want to get notified when they suddenly pass.