Thabit converts from Ancient Greek (i.e. Polytonic Greek) to Spanish six-dot Braille code (.BRA files that can be read with a Braille Lite or a Braille line device).
Input files have to be UTF-8 texts. They can be easily created with
Of course a UNICODE font is needed. A very good one is provided with Thabit (from v1.8); it is named Kadmos, created by Juan-José Marcos from his excellent Alphabetum. Kadmos is freely distributable with Thabit, and your are allowed to use it for academic or personal use; for any other use please contact with its author.
For instance, it takes a file like[2]
and converts it to
Thabit is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL, version 2).
You can download the last release from SourceForge.
Thabit is a perl script, so it should work perfectly on any platform in which perl is installed. It has been tested on GNU/Linux (Debian Woody, Debian Sarge and SuSE 9.0), Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), Win98 and WinXP.
If you have perl already installed, just copy all files in package into a single directory.
Just write at the commandline prompt
perl thabit.pl [-l ca|es] FITXER_ENTRADA [FITXER_EIXIDA]
The -l option indicates if text (apart from Greek pieces) is written in Spanish (es) or in Catalan (ca). That make sense because Thabit was created to convert texts for school work, in which usually questions are not written in Greek but in Spanish or Catalan.
Square brackets indicate optional parameters and options.
I would like to thank Noemí Sanchis for her questions and comments which contributed to improve this program. I would also like to thank Marisa Botella for her help with the English version of this web.
Specially, I would like to thank José María Villar from ONCE (Spanish Organization for the Blind) for his support, for the Braille texts he provided and for his work testing every single release of Thabit.
And, last but not least, thanks to Quico Saval without whom this project would never have begun.
This project is hosted by
[1] While Kadmos is designed to write in Ancient Greek, Latin and most modern european languages, Alphabetum is an affordable and impressive commercial font that allows you to write in most of ancient and modern european languages: Old and Middle English, Russian and other Cyrillic languages (Byelorussian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Moldavian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani/Azeri, Abkazh, Kazakh, etc), Ogham, Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Hiragana, and many others.
[2] Got from Wikipedia (s.v. Polytonic)
© 2005-2006 by Carles Sadurní Anguita
