Braille patterns support

[astefanutti]

Would be useful to have support for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille_Patterns.

[chrissimpkins]

Interesting idea Antonin. Do you happen to know of any free fonts that include these glyphs? I am interested in how the spacing generally works vertically and horizontally. Is there a use case here for programming education of and/or development work by individuals who are visually impaired or are you thinking that this would be useful for other bodies of text, as a fallback for system monospaced fonts that do not include these glyphs? I will have to educate myself a bit about Braille in type and how these shapes are embossed for readers. Thanks for raising the issue.

[astefanutti]

Some free fonts with braille patterns support are listed in http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2801/fontsupport.htm.

On Mac OS, the Apple Braille fonts family (regular, outline, pinpoint) is installed.

Another use case for unicode braille characters is pixel graphics in terminal, which can be a good use case for Hack, given it's oriented to source code, e.g.:

• https://github.com/asciimoo/drawille
• https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib

Chrome recently changed its behaviour when displaying braille characters for Web fonts. The fallback now displays outlined / punched characters instead of regular ones. It can be useful to have a Web font version with regular glyphs.

[chrissimpkins]

Thank you!

Will investigate and definitely interested in supporting this.

It will be useful to know if these glyphs are desirable in some form of web font subset where size vs. set coverage is a real issue. No concerns at all in the desktop builds of the fonts.

[chrissimpkins]

It might also be worth designing a set of Braille glyphs under a free license so that they are easily merged into other free typefaces that would like to support this. Perhaps a naive uneducated opinion at this stage (?), but I am guessing that the same set of glyphs could be used across typefaces with different styles similar to box drawing characters? The metrics might differ but the shapes should not?

[astefanutti]

It might also be worth designing a set of Braille glyphs under a free license so that they are easily merged into other free typefaces that would like to support this.

That'd be awesome!

Perhaps a naive uneducated opinion at this stage (?), but I am guessing that the same set of glyphs could be used across typefaces with different styles similar to box drawing characters? The metrics might differ but the shapes should not?

That is my guess as well. I've made up Hack locally with glyphs from the Apple Braille regular font and it works great.

[chrissimpkins]

Is there an accessibility case to be made here? Struggling to find information about whether these Unicode code points are used by embossers/screen readers/other accessibility hardware in some fashion.

[MartenBE]

Is there any update on this? Would love to use hack in bpytop.

[mohag]

bottom relies on braille characters.

Their troubleshooting guide mentions that losevka supports it - that might be usable as a base. (Looks like an incompatible license though...)

(It might be worth checking with the PR author whether Hack can use those as well)