conversion to Braille

[Bruce Yoshiwara]

Kathy has been asked to create a Braille version of her elementary algebra book. As I understood the pretext Guide, I should ask here for assistance.

Appendix H of the Guide gives instructions for installing Liblouis, but I'll be working on a Windows machine, and the instructions might not be appropriate for me. The Liblouis site has downloads specifically for Windows, but I don't even know what to do with the downloaded zip files.

I'm guessing that I'll eventually be entering some pretext command with appropriate options. We believe we should produce a file appropriate for a Braille printer.

Thanks in advance.

Bruce Yoshiwara

[David Austin]

I don't know anything about installing liblouis on a windows machine, but I've done a braille conversion before and could probably convert Kathy's book fairly easily.  Is this a capability you want to develop for yourself or are you just wanting the finished Braille product?

David

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[Bruce Yoshiwara]

On the PreTeXt-dev group (https://groups.google.com/g/pretext-dev/c/cSte3th4uGs/m/7hCWjucDCQAJ) there has been a discussion of a successful creation of a BRF document on a Windows machine via WSL, the Linux on Windows subsystem. But I've been using GitBash instead, which does not have full Linux functionality (and I'm using mainly because I still get to use the Windows file manager to view and organize my PreTeXt files).

As best I can guess, my main obstacle in fully installing Liblouis is 

configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH

and I have not yet discovered how to get a C compiler in Windows (or a $PATH to one in a Linux subsystem).

Is there a solution short of moving all my PreTeXt files to the WSL?

Bruce

[Oscar Levin]

It's been a while since I've used wsl, but the last time I did there was no problem reading my windows file system from within wsl.

Another option is to use docker desktop to use the same environment that code spaces uses, directly from windows.  There are instructions in chapter 2 of the pretext guide to set this up.  That should have everything you need to make a braille version pre installed.

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[Rob Beezer]

Could we capture some of this discussion/debugging in The Guide?

we have

Appendix H: LibLouis
https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/liblouis.html#liblouis

maybe it could bifurcate into "Build From Source" and "Use System Packages"?

I'd be happy to review what I have already and setup a #section or #paragraphs
for using system packages, and/or whatever needs to be done for VSCode/CLI.

Thanks,
Rob

[Rob Beezer]

Over on pretext-dev there was a long thread "louis module for Braille output
in WSL" that I was also thinking about. Maybe I should have posted this
suggestion there....

Rob

[David Austin]

I can take a swing at enhancing the documentation, assuming no one points out problems with what I wrote in that thread on -dev (aside from not knowing that the CLI can now make braille, which is great news).

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[Rob Beezer]

Thanks, David! I've seen the PR just now, and it looks good. I'll merge it in
real soon now.

Rob

On 12/18/25 14:14, David Austin wrote:
> I can take a swing at enhancing the documentation, assuming no one points out
> problems with what I wrote in that thread on -dev (aside from not knowing that
> the CLI can now make braille, which is great news).
>

> On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 12:27 PM 'Rob Beezer' via PreTeXt support <pretext-
> sup...@googlegroups.com <mailto:pretext...@googlegroups.com>> wrote:
>
> Over on  pretext-dev  there was a long thread "louis module for Braille output
> in WSL" that I was also thinking about.  Maybe I should have posted this
> suggestion there....
>
> Rob
>
> On 12/18/25 08:56, 'Rob Beezer' via PreTeXt support wrote:
> > Could we capture some of this discussion/debugging in The Guide?
> >
> > we have
> >
> > Appendix H: LibLouis

> > https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/liblouis.html#liblouis <https://
> pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/liblouis.html#liblouis>

> >
> > maybe it could bifurcate into "Build From Source" and "Use System Packages"?
> >
> > I'd be happy to review what I have already and setup a #section or
> #paragraphs
> > for using system packages, and/or whatever needs to be done for VSCode/CLI.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Rob
> >
>
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> support/MTAwMDAxNC5iZWV6ZXI.1766078857%40pnsh <https://groups.google.com/d/
> msgid/pretext-support/MTAwMDAxNC5iZWV6ZXI.1766078857%40pnsh>.

>
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> CANXmVMC2oKv-5OzzK02_AM3VaZnir9xr-nMtBOy82RRD1F8_zA%40mail.gmail.com <https://
> groups.google.com/d/msgid/pretext-support/CANXmVMC2oKv-5OzzK02_AM3VaZnir9xr-
> nMtBOy82RRD1F8_zA%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

[Rob Beezer]

Documentation expanded at

https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/pull/2744

Thanks again, David A!

[Bruce Yoshiwara]

Oscar is (of course) correct that docker provides the rest of what I need to make "pretext build braille" work.

But I stumbled around quite a bit trying to set things up appropriately, and I could not possibly write down what I did correctly (or all the mistakes made).  I ended up using the VS Code chat suggestions mindlessly, and the final message was

"The import error for braille_format was caused by using an outdated version of PreTeXt (2.19.3), which did not include the braille_format module. Upgrading to PreTeXt 2.33.2 resolved this issue. Additionally, a bug in the louis package (version 3.24.0) was fixed by adding the missing _is_py3 variable definition.

"I've updated your requirements.txt to pin PreTeXt to version 2.33.2. You can now try running pretext build braille again. Note that braille output is experimental and may have some limitations or placeholders for unimplemented elements."

Thanks!

Bruce