TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THIS MANUAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 SECTION I: THE BASICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 CHAPTER 1: GETTING STARTED. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 1.1 THE FIRST TIME OUT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 * 1.2 The Concept of Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 1.3 How to Use The Commands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 * 1.4 The Concept of Menus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 * 1.4.1 The Options Menu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 * 1.4.2 The Status Menu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 * 1.4.3 How to Handle the Built-in Battery. . . . . . . . 13 * 1.4.4 Reversing the Advance Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 * 1.4.5 The Parameters Menu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 CHAPTER 2: MAKING THE BRAILLE LITE TALK THE WAY YOU WANT . . . . . 16 2.1 Volume, Speech Rate, Pitch, and Tone . . . . . . . . . . . 16 2.2 Announcement of Punctuation and Numbers . . . . . . . 17 * 2.3 Using the Braille Display Instead of the Voice . . . . . 18 * 2.4 The Concept of Toggling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 SECTION II: WORKING WITH YOUR FILES. . . . . . . . . 20 CHAPTER 3: READING YOUR FILES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3.1 The Cursor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 * 3.1.1 Displaying the Cursor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 * 3.2 Navigating through a File. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 * 3.3 Reading Blocks of Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 * 3.3.1 Scrolling the Braille Display . . . . . . . . . . 26 * 3.3.2 Defining Blocks of Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 * 3.3.3 Having the Voice Spell Out Words. . . . . . . . . 28 3.4 Some Tips on Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 * 3.4.1 The Automatic Braille Translator . . . . . . . . 29 * 3.4.2 Special Types of Characters . . . . . . . . . . . 30 * 3.4.3 Displaying Special Characters . . . . . . . . . . 30 * 3.5 Searching for Text in a File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.5.1 The Location of the Cursor. . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.5.2 Finding Text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.5.3 Case-Sensitive Searches for Text. . . . . . . . . . 35 CHAPTER 4: WRITING IN YOUR FILES. . . . . . . . . . 37 4.1 The Files Menu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 4.2 Creating a File. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 * 4.3 Where is the Cursor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 4.4 Room Left in Your File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 4.5 Getting Help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 4.6 Writing Text in Your File. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 4.7 Writing Control Characters into a File . . . . . . . . . . 40 * 4.8 Wordwrapping on the Braille Display. . . . . . . . . . . 43 * 4.9 Formatting Text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 * 4.9.1 Setting and Adjusting Margins . . . . . . . . . . 46 * 4.9.2 Formatting and the Status Menu . . . . . . . . . 49 * 4.9.3 Centering, Tabbing, Headers, Footers, and Numbering Pages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.9.4 Changing the Appearance of Print Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 * 4.9.5 Inserting a Time Stamp on a Printed Document. . . 54 * 4.9.6 Skipping Blocks of Text to Print . . . . . . . . 54 * 4.10 Selecting your Writing Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 CHAPTER 5: EDITING TEXT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 * 5.1 Overwriting Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 5.2 Backspacing and Rubbing Out a Character. . . . . . . . . . 60 * 5.3 Deleting Text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 * 5.4 Inserting Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 5.5 Copying Text into Your File. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 * 5.6 Deleting Blocks of Text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 * 5.7 Find and Replace Text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 CHAPTER 6: MANIPULATING FILES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 6.1 Listing your Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 6.2 Navigating Through Your Files. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 6.3 Opening an Existing File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 6.4 Opening an Existing File by Its Number . . . . . . . . . . 76 6.5 Renaming a File. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 * 6.6 Write-Protecting and Unprotecting a File . . . . . . . . 78 * 6.7 Deleting Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 6.8 Changing the Size of a File. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 6.9 Free Space in the Braille Lite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 SECTION III: WORKING WITH OTHER TOOLS . . . . . . . 85 CHAPTER 7: THE CLOCK AND THE CALENDAR . . . . . . . . 85 7.1 The Clock. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 7.2 The Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 7.2.1 Checking Today's Date . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 7.2.2 Setting Today's Date. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 7.2.3 Getting a Date from the Calendar. . . . . . . . . . 87 * 7.2.4 Inserting a Date into Your Calendar . . . . . . . 88 7.2.5 Calendar Alert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 * 7.3 Information About Your Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 CHAPTER 8: THE STOPWATCH AND THE TIMER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 8.1 The Stopwatch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 8.1.1 Starting and Stopping the Stopwatch . . . . . . . . 92 8.1.2 Reading Elapsed Time by Voice . . . . . . . . . . . 93 8.1.3 Stopping and Resetting the Stopwatch. . . . . . . . 93 8.2 The Timer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 8.2.1 Finding out Time Remaining. . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 8.2.2 Timing in the Background. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 CHAPTER 9: THE CALCULATOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 9.1 Basic Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 9.2 Setting Precision. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 9.3 Inserting Calculation Results into a File. . . . . . . . . 97 9.4 Performing Percentage Calculations . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 9.5 Storing and Using the Memory Locations . . . . . . . . . . 99 9.6 Extracting a Square Root . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 * 9.7 Complex Functions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .100 9.8 Error Messages and Tips. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .100 CHAPTER 10: OTHER HELPFUL FEATURES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 10.1 Word Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 10.2 The One-Handed Braille Lite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103 10.3 Review Only Mode. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103 CHAPTER 11: MACROS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105 11.1 What's a Macro, Anyway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105 11.2 Recording a Macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105 11.3 Playing an Existing Macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 11.4 How to Check a Macro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 11.5 Pausing a Macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108 11.6 Write-Protecting Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110 * 11.7 Adding your Own Messages to a Macro . . . . . . . . . .110 CHAPTER 12: THE SPELLCHECKER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112 12.1 Running the Spellchecker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112 12.2 Adding a Word to your Personal Dictionary . . . . . . . .112 12.3 Bypassing a Word for the Rest of the Document . . . . . .112 12.4 Reading a Word in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113 12.5 Correcting a Word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113 12.6 Repeating a Word. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113 12.7 Overlooking a Word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113 12.8 Suggested Replacement Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113 SECTION IV: CONVERSING WITH OTHER DEVICES. . . . . .115 CHAPTER 13: INTRODUCING TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND SETTINGS . . . . . .115 13.1 Cables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115 * 13.1.1 Serial versus Parallel . . . . . . . . . . . . .116 13.1.2 Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116 13.1.3 Number of Pins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116 13.1.4 Null Modem Cable Requirements. . . . . . . . . . .117 13.2 Telecommunications Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117 13.2.1 Baud Rate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117 13.2.2 Parity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .118 13.2.3 Duplex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .118 13.2.4 Data Bits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119 13.2.5 Stop Bits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119 13.2.6 Handshaking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120 13.2.7 The Interactive Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120 13.2.8 Rejecting Ornamentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . .121 CHAPTER 14: THE PORTABLE DISK DRIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .122 14.1 How to Operate the Disk DRive . . . . . . . . . . . . . .122 14.2 Retrieving a File from Disk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123 14.3 Saving a File to Disk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .124 14.4 Transmitting Textfiles or Applications. . . . . . . . . .125 14.4.1 Sending Files to the Disk Drive. . . . . . . . . .125 14.4.2 Receiving Files from the Disk Drive. . . . . . . .126 14.5 Adding an Application to the Braille Lite . . . . . . . .127 14.6 Reading the Directory from a Disk . . . . . . . . . . . .128 CHAPTER 15: PRINTERS, MODEMS, AND COMPUTERS . . . . . . . . . . . .130 15.1 Transmission Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130 15.1.1 Activating the Serial Port . . . . . . . . . . . .130 15.1.2 Appending Linefeeds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130 * 15.2 Physical Page Format Considerations . . . . . . . . . .131 * 15.2.1 Printing Text Without Translating. . . . . . . .132 * 15.2.2 Finding out What Page is Being Printed . . . . .132 * 15.2.3 Transmitting a Portion of a Document . . . . . .132 * 15.2.4 Double-Spacing a Document on the Fly . . . . . .133 * 15.2.5 Checking out Where Text Would Appear on a Physical Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .133 15.3 Sending Blocks of Text to Another Device. . . . . . . . .135 * 15.4 Modems and Other Computers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137 15.5 Using Sophisticated Modem Protocols in Transmission . . .139 * 15.6 The Braille Lite as a Speech Synthesizer. . . . . . . .143 * 15.7 Sending Braille Lite Ouput to Your Computer Screen. . .146 * CHAPTER 16: RUNNING EXTERNAL PROGRAMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . .148 16.1 The Checkbook Writer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .148 16.1.1 Start-Up Messages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149 16.1.2 Entering the Account Filename . . . . . . . . . .149 16.1.3 Menu Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149 16.1.4 Generating a Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . .153 16.2 Editing Macros. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .154 16.2.1 Command Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .155 16.2.2 Editing a Key Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . .157 16.3 The Easy Braille Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .158 16.3.1 Some Tips on Running the Translator. . . . . . . .159 16.3.2 Menu Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .159 16.3.3 Translation Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . .160 16.4 Teach Braille . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .163 APPENDIX A: TROUBLESHOOTING. . . . . . . . . . . . .166 TELECOMMUNICATIONS QUESTIONS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166 PRINTING QUESTIONS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .168 CRASH AND RECOVERY QUESTIONS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .170 BRAILLE TRANSLATION QUESTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .172 BRAILLE DISPLAY QUESTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .173 MISCELLANEOUS QUESTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .173 APPENDIX B: QUICK REFERENCE. . . . . . . . . . . . .177 SPEECH PARAMETERS MENU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177 BRAILLE DISPLAY COMMANDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .178 FILE COMMANDS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .179 ENTERING TEXT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .180 CURSOR MOVEMENT AND SPEAKING OF TEXT . . . . . . . . . . . . .181 FINDING, REPLACING, DELETING, AND INSERTING TEXT . . . . . . .182 * FORMATTING TEXT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .184 CLOCK AND CALENDAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .185 STOPWATCH/COUNT-DOWN TIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .186 SCIENTIFIC CALCULATOR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .186 MACROS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .188 SPELLCHECK FUNCTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 DISK DRIVE FUNCTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 TRANSMITTING DATA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .190 OPTIONS MENU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .191 PARAMETERS MENU. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .192 STATUS MENU DEFAULT SETTINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .193 MISCELLANEOUS COMMANDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .195 APPENDIX C: TECHNICAL DATA ABOUT PORTS . . . . . . .196 APPENDIX D: ASCII BRAILLE SYMBOLS. . . . . . . . . .197 ABOUT THIS MANUAL For those of you who already have a Braille Lite and know how to use many of its features, we've revised the 1993 Braille 'n Speak User Guide you probably received with your unit so that it is now truly a Braille Lite user guide with all the details on the latest enhancements through May, 1995. A section heading or paragraph preceded by an asterisk (*) is "new". Check the Table of Contents to see where they are. Don't be fooled by a section's name. For example, the section on overwriting contains new information and so we've highlighted it with an asterisk. So, even if you're already familiar with how to "overwrite" text in your Braille Lite, check this section out because we've improved how this feature works. This manual is your "road map" as you explore the Braille Lite's modes, features and functions. In each chapter, we discuss commands and the tasks they perform; and, we provide you with detailed examples of how to apply them in your daily life. Each chapter focuses on a specific topic area and takes you through all of the commands related to that topic in detail. Here is a key to the map: INTRODUCTION: Tells you what a Braille Lite is. SECTION I - THE BASICS: Explains what to do the first time you take the Braille Lite out of the box. SECTION II - WORKING WITH YOUR FILES: Walks you slowly and painlessly through reading, writing, and manipulating files. SECTION III - WORKING WITH OTHER TOOLS: Tours the Braille Lite's calendar, calculator, stopwatch, timer, and much more - with real-life examples. SECTION IV - CONVERSING WITH OTHER DEVICES: Demystifies the complicated business of file transfers, printing considerations, the external disk drive, and external programs - all in simple language, minus the technobabble you usually find in discussions of telecommunications. APPENDIX A - TROUBLESHOOTING: Answers commonly asked questions about file recovery, file transfer screw-ups, and the like. APPENDIX B - QUICK REFERENCE: Lists by subject all Braille Lite commands. APPENDIX C - TECHNICAL DATA ABOUT THE PORTS: Provides technical specifications for linking the Braille Lite to nonstandard devices. APPENDIX D - ASCII BRAILLE SYMBOLS: Provides a complete table for the ASCII character set in computer braille. By the time you finish exploring the Braille Lite universe, you'll wonder how you managed without it. INTRODUCTION What Is a Braille Lite? The Braille Lite is a computer that lets you write in braille and responds to you with speech and/or with braille. It translates Grade 2 or Grade 1 braille text - even computer braille text - into spoken words through its built-in speech synthesizer. And it can display braille text on its refreshable braille display. Weighing about two pounds, and having its own internal, rechargeable battery and storage, this powerful computer can act as your notebook, your rollodex, your calendar, your calculator, your stopwatch, your timer, and much more! You can use a Braille Lite comfortably and unobtrusively at a meeting, on a street corner or a subway, just as anyone uses a pencil and notepad. And, chances are, you won't run out of room because the unit can store over six hundred physical pages of braille (or 640K of random-access memory). The Braille Lite can "talk" with other computers - whether it's to store information on a disk or retrieve it for you to read later, or whether it's to print files with an ink printer or braille them with a braille embosser. Using an external modem and your telephone, the Braille Lite links you to a wealth of information: news, shopping, research, conversation with other computer users, and so on. If you have a personal computer with a screen access program (ASAP, Jaws, or Vocal-Eyes - just to mention a few popular ones), you can turn your Braille Lite into a portable speech synthesizer through its "speech box" mode and you can use its braille display to check your computer screen. This can come in handy if you're on the go a lot and want to minimize the gear you carry, or you suddenly have to access a computer at a colleague's desk (in a hurry). It's much easier to carry a floppy with your screen access program on it and your Braille Lite than to carry around an extra speech synthesizer or a hefty braille display device. So let's get started! SECTION I: THE BASICS INTRODUCTION This section covers very basic information about the Braille Lite: what it looks like, what to expect when you turn it on for the first time, how to set up the voice to your liking, how to read with the braille display, and how to navigate around the menu system. If you're already generally familiar with how to operate your Braille Lite, you may wish to skim most of this section. But we do recommend you read the parts marked with an asterisk so you don't miss out on any new features or information about your unit. CHAPTER 1: GETTING STARTED Let's start by giving the Braille Lite a physical to see what it looks like and to learn the basics about its use. The Braille Lite is about the size of a video cassette and about twice its height. Its keyboard consists of the standard seven-key layout of a Perkins-style braillewriter and it has an 18-cell braille display. The rubber feet on its bottom prevent the machine from sliding around as you work. Place the unit in front of you with the braille display closest to you. With the unit turned off, the braille display looks like a row of Grade 2 braille for- signs (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6). Looking at the Braille Lite with the braille display closest to you, first notice the long bar immediately in back of the braille display. This is the "advance bar" and we'll be using it a lot to move the braille shown on the display at any given time. You can't confuse the advance bar with the spacebar because the spacebar on the Braille Lite feels just like the one on your standard Perkins-style braillewriter. In fact, feel in back and slightly above the advance bar on the Braille Lite and you'll find the seven-key, Perkins-style braillewriter setup with which you're probably already familiar. If you have a Braille 'n Speak or have ever worked with one, you'll quickly see that the Braille Lite is very much like it, except that it's a little heavier, taller, and bigger from front to back than the Braille 'n Speak to accommodate the braille display. If you've ever worked with a refreshable braille display device (for example, Telesensory's VersaBraille or Navigator or HumanWare's Alva or MiniBraille), the concept of a movable (or refreshable) braille display and the advance bar will be familiar. But we'll assume that you may have no experience with such a device and spend a little time explaining the concept. At first, it may seem that having eighteen cells of braille displayed at a time is not very practical. In fact, most of the refreshable braille display devices today show up to forty or even eighty cells of braille at a time. However, we opted for the small display to retain the portability of the Braille Lite, and to keep the cost of the unit as low as possible (the pins that make up the braille are very expensive). The advance bar will move the braille instantly for you and you'll find that not having to physically move your hands very much while reading can be a plus. The Braille Lite's display can show either six-dot, or eight-dot braille. (Eight-dot braille can be handy - especially when reading computer braille and for keeping track of where you're writing, as we'll see later.) The display can hold up to eighteen cells of braille at a time, but you can control whether it does indeed show that many at a time. You may find it more practical to have the display show characters only up to the end of a line of text, or to have the display not break up words at odd places, and so on. We'll get into all these details in due course. For now, just be aware that you have a great deal of control over how the display actually shows you the braille and even whether it shows you braille at all. Yes, there are times you may even wish to turn it off. Now let's continue examining the Braille Lite itself. Find the right corner closest to you and slide your finger toward the back of the unit. About halfway, you'll find the "on/off" rocker switch. To turn the Braille Lite on, rock the switch away from you; to turn it off, rock it toward you. Immediately in back of the "on/off" rocker switch is an earphone jack. You can also use this jack to connect your Braille Lite to an external speaker or a patch cord to send the Braille Lite's voice output to a tape recorder. Now, find the left corner of the unit that is closest to you and keep your finger toward the top of the machine. Slide your finger toward the back of the unit and find two rectangular openings with a bunch of little pins in each of them. These openings (called ports) are used to connect the Braille Lite to other devices. The port closest to you is used to connect the Braille Lite to a portable disk drive (also available from Blazie Engineering). Immediately in back of the disk drive port is a second port (called a serial port or an RS-232 port), which is used to connect the Braille Lite to printers, other computers, and modems. In back of the two ports is the input jack for the A.C. power supply/battery charger. Directly under the two ports and A.C. jack is a larger port with a lot of tiny holes in it. This is a "female" parallel port that you can use to connect your Braille Lite directly to a printer that uses that type of connection. We'll talk about printers in detail in Section IV. * A word of caution about the battery charger: When charging the Braille Lite's built-in battery, you should use the wall transformer supplied with the unit which is specifically designed to provide the necessary voltage and current. Substituting another transformer which looks or feels like the correct one, but which has the incorrect voltage requirements, could destroy chips or other critical parts of the Braille Lite. You should not even substitute the Braille 'n Speak's charger for the Braille Lite's. Whatever you do, if you happen to have access to both units, and to both chargers, keep them straight because using the Braille 'n Speak's charger to recharge the Braille Lite could damage it, as well as the charger. Since the Braille Lite's charger is the larger of the two, you should generally have no problem in telling them apart. You might, however, label them in some way just in case you forget which charger goes with which machine. Under normal usage, a fully-charged Braille Lite functions properly under battery power for up to thirty hours. However, the length of time a Braille Lite can function under battery power varies according to how you use it. For example, to use the Braille Lite to communicate with another computer, you must activate the serial port. Heavy use of the serial port with the Braille Lite on battery power, rather than on A.C., drains the battery more quickly. (Note: Although we offer an emergency cable that lets you power the Braille 'n Speak from an external battery in case you can't charge your battery immediately, this emergency cable is not available for the Braille Lite.) There is a handy safety feature on the Braille Lite relevant to battery usage. Although the Braille Lite does not automatically warn you when the battery starts getting low, there is a way you can check to see how much time you have left before you're in danger. We'll show you how to do this later in this section. Operating your Braille Lite for too long at a low voltage condition may cause the "scrambling" of data stored in the machine. Should this happen, you may be able to recover the data, as you'll see later. If you do decide to experiment with the length of battery usage and your data, don't have any data you desperately need to keep - at least not until you are familiar with how to recover data on the Braille Lite. The Braille Lite comes fully charged from the factory. But eventually you'll need to recharge the battery. Once you have done so, you must remember to set the Battery Use Timer. We'll show you how to do that shortly. The optimal way to use the Braille Lite is to keep it turned off most of the time when you are not actually doing something with it. In other words, if you are not reading, writing, computing or transmitting data, keep the unit turned off. The great thing is that turning it off does not erase your data and turning it back on instantly places you wherever you last stopped. In fact, the Braille Lite does not like to be ignored. It reminds you, by voice and on its braille display, that it is still turned on with a "hello?" message if you have not pressed a key within five minutes. And it continues to try to get your attention in this way until you react - either by pressing a key or by turning off the unit. If you should have the Braille Lite's voice turned off and be working only with the braille display, you'll hear a beep instead of seeing the word "hello" as a reminder. Now, let's go to work. 1.1 THE FIRST TIME OUT Before we do anything else with the Braille Lite, let's learn how to use the advance bar. It is critical at the outset that you understand how the advance bar works to avoid confusion between what the Braille Lite speaks and what it displays. Recall that the advance bar is the long bar located between the braille display and the Perkins-style keyboard. Tapping the right end of the advance bar moves the braille display forward. Tapping the left end of the advance bar moves the braille display backward. Just how much forward or backward the display moves may vary slightly depending on how you have the unit set. When it comes from the factory, the display will show you as many as eighteen characters at a time. (By the way, in computerland, spaces are characters, too.) If possible, the Braille Lite will try not to break up words in the middle. It will show you something like "105 East" followed by what appear to be a bunch of empty cells or "spaces" and then "Jarrettsville" when you tap the advance bar forward, rather than showing you part of the word "Jarrettsville" before you tap the advance bar and the rest after you tap it again to move the display. Of course, there may be times when you want the display to show you as much as possible at a time and we'll show you how to do that eventually. When you have both speech and braille turned on, you will often experience a slight difference between the two which, at first, may seem confusing. Since speech is not restricted to the eighteen-character limit of the braille display, the Braille Lite's voice will frequently race ahead of the braille display. No problem. Simply tap the advance bar as many times as necessary to read the entire message that has just been spoken. Even if you're in the middle of reading a file, if you have the braille display and the speech both turned on and you issue a command, the Braille Lite will of course speak and display any prompts related to the command. Such prompts or messages are never entered into your file by the Braille Lite automatically. The unit merely lets you read the message by allowing you to tap the advance bar as many times as you need to in order to read the entire message, and then returns you to whatever you were reading. The way the Braille Lite displays certain messages varies slightly from what you hear, however. As we go through this manual, we'll point out where these variations occur. For the most part, when a message on the braille display is different from that which is spoken, it is because we wanted to give you as much information as possible within the eighteen-character limit and chose to truncate some messages on the braille display accordingly. For example, instead of prompting you that a file has twelve pages and spelling out the "twelve" or the word "pages", the Braille Lite displays "12p", even though it speaks "twelve pages". Messages and prompts on the braille display are either in Grade 1 braille or computer braille. From the factory, the Braille Lite is set to display prompts and messages in Grade 1 braille. But we'll show you how to change this should you prefer messages and prompts in computer braille. Again, don't worry too much right now if all this seems bewildering and unwieldy. It really isn't because the advance bar moves the braille virtually instantaneously, probably faster than you could move your hands to read the next line of a physical braille page. In any case, at first, we'll walk you through reading any prompts that are longer than eighteen characters on the braille display. And we'll always specify exactly how prompts that are truncated on the braille display differ from spoken ones. For the sake of clarity, the first few times we ask you to look at the display, we'll tell you specifically how many times you need to tap the advance bar to see the entire message. After a while, though, we'll assume you understand that when a message is longer than eighteen characters, you'll need to tap the advance bar to see the entire message displayed. So, we'll mostly continue to use the words "announce" and "says" when referring to Braille Lite prompts. We'll assume you have both braille and speech turned on unless we specifically ask you to turn one or the other off. Since the braille display can operate slightly differently when speech is turned off altogether, we'll show you how that works in Section II in a part called, "Scrolling the Braille Display". Once you're comfortable with the Braille Lite, or if you're in a setting where the Braille Lite's start-up prompt might disturb a meeting, for example, you may choose to start up the Braille Lite silently. To do this, simply hold down the spacebar as you turn on the unit. A click indicates that the Braille Lite is ready for use. If you want to turn on the Braille Lite with speech off and only the braille display on, hold down the braille dots for the letter b as you turn on the unit. If you want to start the Braille Lite with the braille display off and only speech on, hold down the braille dots for the letter s while you turn on the unit. For now, we recommend you don't try this since you still don't know how to reverse these settings other than by turning the unit on and off holding down the appropriate letter. Now, let's assume you're starting from scratch, with the Braille Lite set up as it comes straight from the factory. Turn the Braille Lite "on" by flipping the "on/off" rocker switch away from you. The unit says, "Braille Lite ready; Help is open." If this does not happen, flip the rocker switch back toward you to the "off" position and plug the A.C. power supply/battery charger into the A.C. jack and flip the switch "on" again. You should then hear the announcement, "Braille Lite ready; Help is open". On the braille display you'll see rapidly going by, "Braille Lite ready, Help is open. 0 help 16677 5p". The "16677" and 5p" may vary slightly on your unit, depending on how recent is your update. Ironically, you already have more information on the braille display than was spoken, in this case. What your braille display stopped on is information about this file that is currently open: its number in the Braille Lite's file numbering system (which we'll talk about in Section II), the file's name, its size in terms of the number of characters in the file, and the number of Braille Lite "pages" the file contains. All of these pieces of information will be explained in Section II in great detail. For now, let's just see what happens if you tap the advance bar on the braille display. Tap the right end of the advance bar and you'll instantly see, "Braille Lite Help". Press it again to see, "File Writing" and again to see, "Functions". In fact, if you wish, you can keep tapping the right end of the advance bar and continue reading. You're way ahead of Braille 'n Speak users who are still waiting to find out about how to work with the Braille 'n Speak's voice and how to get the Braille 'n Speak to read anything. Go ahead and move the display backward by tapping the left end of the advance bar. Eventually, you'll see, "top of file", which obviously means that you're back at the beginning of the file. Notice that, while you've been moving about with the advance bar, the Braille Lite has not spoken again. For that, you'll have to read the next chapter in this section and the first chapter of Section II that shows you how to work with the Braille Lite's voice. Let's continue now with learning about "files". * 1.2 The Concept of Files Think of the Braille Lite, as it comes from the factory, as a nearly empty, three-ring binder just waiting for you to fill it with your own personal data. Usually, a three-ring binder comes with tabs, or separators of some kind, to indicate the start of a new section in the binder. The Braille Lite comes with a number of "files" ready for your use. The number of files may vary, depending on whether we have included files that contain the latest update information, and so on. But there are some files that are a permanent part of the "binder" that always come with the Braille Lite from the factory. The Help file contains a summary of the commands you use to operate the Braille Lite. The Clipboard file is like a blank scratchpad or trash can (more on this later). The calendar file is ready for you to cram with your busy schedule. * The spelling dictionary program is loaded in a file called Spell.dic. Unlike the Help, Clipboard, and Calendar files whose contents you can actually read, the Spell.dic file is a program file. In other words, this is a file the Braille Lite can access to help you do spellchecking, rather than a file you can read yourself. We'll talk about spellchecking in detail in Chapter 12, and you'll learn how to "run" or "execute" program files in general in Chapter 16 where we talk about working with external programs. For now, just be aware that this Spell.dic file is used by the Braille Lite and not by you directly. It does take up a considerable chunk of space in the Braille Lite's memory, however, and you may choose to remove it from your unit later on. * Another program file that comes on your Braille Lite from the factory is the Bsname.bns program file. Again, this is a file the Braille Lite can access, not you. The program lets you add your own name to the serial number burned into the unit from the factory and this process involves Flash ROM. Let's stop here for a minute and explain why having Flash ROM in your Braille Lite is so convenient. We at Blazie Engineering appreciate how challenging it would be for you to part with your Braille Lite whenever you wish to take advantage of the new features in our latest releases. Flash ROM makes it possible for you to update your unit yourself. Here's how it works. You can update your Braille Lite from a special program you load into your machine from disk. Since the Flash ROM board has been installed into your unit, all you do then is run the program to actually perform the update. If you're a new user of the Braille Lite, you have the latest features. But you, too, will appreciate how nice it will be simply to upgrade your machine yourself when we release an update. It's quite easy to do. Just load into your machine the update program file from disk (either using our portable disk drive or from a PC with a telecommunications program). Then run the update, just as you would any of our other external programs - the checkbook, for instance. We'll get into the details of how to load files and how to run external programs in due course. For now, what's important is knowing that updating your Braille Lite is relatively hassle-free. Now, let's continue learning how to use the basic features of the Braille Lite. As we said earlier, when you start up the Braille Lite for the first time, after the announcement, "Braille Lite ready", you hear the prompt, "Help is open." Also remember that whenever you turn it off, the Braille Lite keeps your place for you wherever you had stopped in a file. When you turn it on, it reminds you where you left off by announcing the name of the file you left open. Since this is your first time out, the Braille Lite announces that you have the Help file open. 1.3 How to Use The Commands All of the Braille Lite's commands are produced by "chording". If you've ever played a piano or other keyboard instrument, you know that a chord refers to any two or more keys pressed together. Isn't that what you do anyway when you braille, you might ask? Yes. But for our purposes, "chording" means pressing any combination of braille dots along with the spacebar. So, for example, if we say, "Press the l-chord", we mean, "Press the spacebar together with dots 1-2-3 (the braille letter l), making sure to press all the keys simultaneously. Whenever we refer to a chord for a braille symbol other than a letter of the alphabet, we will write out the exact dots to be pressed in parentheses for clarity. So, for example, when referring to an "ar-sign" in Grade 2 braille, we will also write out "dots 3-4-5" in parentheses. There are several levels of commands in the Braille Lite: commands for bringing up menus of options, commands for navigating through your files and for performing various editing functions within those files, and commands for utilizing the Braille Lite's built-in tools, such as running the stopwatch or storing to a floppy disk or computing a formula. We'll get to each of these in separate chapters. For now, let's just stick to the basic commands you need to get started. The Braille Lite is pretty forgiving when it comes to aborting a command procedure. You usually press an e-chord to "enter" or "execute" a command. But most of the time, if you change your mind in midstream, you can cancel the process with a z-chord. Depending on what you are doing, the Braille Lite responds to an e-chord either by performing some command or by exiting a menu that you have entered (more on this later). But if you do halt a command procedure with a z-chord, the Braille Lite announces, "Abort". * 1.4 The Concept of Menus As we mentioned above, the Braille Lite has a set of commands for working with menus. Just as a restaurant menu offers you choices of food, menus on a computer offer you choices of functions to perform. And a "submenu" offers more levels of choice. Continuing our restaurant menu analogy, let's say that the major menu is for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Then if you pick the dinner menu, you'll see choices for appetizers, entrees, deserts and beverages. Clearly, you'll then need to check out each of those sets of choices for which appetizer, entree and beverage you want - and, if you're very good, you'll skip the set of desert choices. The Braille Lite's menu system works very much like a restaurant menu. Basically, there is an Options menu, a Speech Parameters menu, a Status menu and a Parameters menu. Like the desert menu, each menu in the Braille Lite provides you with choices of its own. For example, from the Options menu, you have choices like: Calendar Check, File Commands, Calculator, Stopwatch, and Spellcheck, as well as many others. Some of the menus are for performing functions and issuing commands. Some, like the Status Menu, are for setting things to work to your specifications - like turning a setting on and off or switching among a setting's various modes. You can navigate through all the choices in a Braille Lite menu quite easily. When you issue a command that brings up a set of choices, you can either write the specific letter that selects the choice you want, or you can cycle through the choices till you find the specific one you want. You move forward through the choices with a dot 4-chord, backward with a dot 1-chord. To move to the first choice in a menu, press an l-chord and to move to the last choice, press a dots 4-5-6-chord. Of course, the braille display shows you the choices as the voice speaks them. To hear the current choice repeated, press a c-chord. Once you hear the choice you want, you press an e- chord to select it. Sometimes, doing so brings up another set of choices (or a submenu). We'll show you those types of menus in Section II. For now, let's look at three of the major menus in the Braille Lite. * 1.4.1 The Options Menu The Options Menu is one of the most important menus in the Braille Lite. You'll be using it a lot and after a short time you probably won't need to cycle through its choices. You'll just know them automatically. But since we're just starting out, let's show you how to browse through the choices. We'll only cycle through the choices at this time, not select any to work with in particular. From the Help file that you currently have open, press an o-chord to bring up the Options menu. The Braille Lite says, "Option." Press a c-chord to hear the current choice. The Braille Lite should say, "Calendar Check". Go ahead and press dot 4-chords and dot 1-chords to hear the numerous choices in this menu. The last choice you'll hear is "Execute Program". If you press another dot 4-chord after hearing that choice, you'll simply hear a click to let you know you're at the end of the choices. Likewise, if you press a dot 1-chord at the top of the list of choices, you'll hear a click to let you know you're at the beginning of the choices. Press l-chords and dot 4-5-6-chords to jump to and from the first and last choices in the menu. Stop somewhere in the middle of the choices and press a c-chord to hear the current choice spoken again. Though it may be tempting, try to refrain from pressing an e-chord on any of these choices since we haven't talked about any of them in detail. But if you're adventurous and happen to press an e-chord on a choice, you can always get out of trouble fast by pressing a z-chord. Doing so brings you back to your file wherever you had stopped. In our case, that's the Help file and we should be right at the beginning of the file. * 1.4.2 The Status Menu The Status Menu contains information about the status of each setting in the Braille Lite. In this menu, you'll find selections such as Format parameters, Serial Parameters, and so on. Don't worry about these terms right now. Let's just skim through the choices on the Status menu for practice. Bring up the Status menu from wherever you are by pressing an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). You should hear, "Status Menu, Interactive on." The display shows you, "Interactive on". Move around through the choices by pressing dot 4-chords and dot 1-chords. Or, use the advance bar to move through the choices by tapping the right end to move forward and the left end to move backward through the menu. There are lots of choices and it may get confusing to listen to and see so many settings that are unfamiliar. So jump to the last choice with a dots 4-5-6-chord. You should hear, Reverse Advance off". Jump back to the first choice with an l-chord or with another dot 4- chord. If you jump to the beginning of the choices with an l-chord, or if you press dot 1-chords repeatedly to bring you back to the beginning, pressing another dot 1-chord cycles you around to the last choice again. Stop somewhere in the middle and press a c-chord to hear the current choice. You can get out of the Status menu with an e-chord or a z-chord. When you're on a particular setting, it can be changed only by writing a specific response - usually the letter y to turn it on and the letter n to turn it off. But again, our goal right now is simply to cycle through the choices themselves. So this is not important. We'll detail each and every choice on the Status menu as we learn about them. Another way to jump quickly to some of the major groups of settings in the Status menu is to press a dots 5-6-chord to move forward or a dots 2-3-chord to move backward. These commands move you to the first setting in a major group. For example, from the first choice, "Interactive on", to which you return with an l-chord if you've moved beyond it in your practice, press a dots 5-6-chord. You'll hear, "Serial Parameters, Interactive on". Press the same command again and hear, "Miscellaneous Parameters, Braille Translator on". A third time brings you to, "Format Parameters, Printer is Epson Compatible". A fourth time shows, "Braille Display Parameters, braille display on" and one more time cycles you back to "Serial Parameters, Interactive on". Cycle backward through these major groups with dots 2-3-chords. Again, this procedure simply jumps you to the first choice in a major group of choices to save you time as you cycle through this large menu. Of course, the fastest way of all to select a choice is to know what character to write that selects it. As we go through the choices in the Status menu as they come up in this manual, we'll detail each choice and its corresponding character that selects it quickly. One nice thing about the Status menu is that it remembers what setting you chose last and places you there the next time you enter the Status menu. So, for example, if you stop on "Battery used" and then exit the Status menu, the next time you enter the Status menu, you'll be right there at that setting. And, while we're here, it's a good time to show you two very important settings because they may affect you sooner than you might think. These are the "Battery used" setting and the "percent not charging" setting. * 1.4.3 How to Handle the Built-in Battery Recall that we said earlier how important it is to be aware of the length of time your battery has been running since you last charged your Braille Lite. The Braille Lite cannot warn you when its battery is running low, but you can check what percentage of battery drain you have. Enter the Status menu from wherever you are with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4- chord) and write an sh-sign (dots 1-4-6). (By the way, this happens to be the computer braille symbol for percent.) The Braille Lite says and displays one of three possible messages: "x% not charging", "Quick charge", or "Trickle charge." "Not charging" means just that; the Braille Lite is not plugged into an outlet. The closer the percentage is to 0, the nearer you are to needing to recharge the Braille Lite. "Quick charge" means that the Braille Lite is plugged into an outlet and that the battery is being charged. "Trickle charge" means that the Braille Lite is plugged into an outlet with the battery fully charged. When it is fully charged, the battery shuts down to prevent overcharging and takes a charge as it needs it. When you have checked the status of battery drain, you can exit the Status menu with the usual e-chord. Once you've recharged the battery, it's a good idea to go into the Status menu and set the battery drain counter back to 0 so that you have an accurate reading of how well your unit is retaining its charge. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and then select the choice, "Battery used", by writing a th-sign (dots 1-4-5-6) to bring you directly to the setting (a th-sign is computer braille for question mark). The Braille Lite says something like, "Battery used, 0 hours, 10 minutes". Of course, the actual time will depend on how long the unit has run since its last charge. We don't mean how long a time has passed since you last turned the unit on, but how long since the Braille Lite was last charged. If you've just recharged the battery and want to bring the timer back to 0, write a y. The Braille Lite says, "Reset battery timer, y or n?" If you write a y for yes, you'll hear, "0 hours, 0 minutes". Exit the Status menu with the usual e-chord. If you don't want to reset the timer, just write an n and exit the menu with an e-chord. * 1.4.4 Reversing the Advance Bar As we saw in Section 1.4.2, the last choice on the Status menu is "Reverse Advance" and it's set to "off" from the factory. Recall our description of what effect tapping the advance bar produces on the braille display. Tapping the right end of the bar moves the braille display forward up to eighteen characters worth of text. Tapping the left end of the bar moves you backward. If you like, you can reverse this movement. Bring up the Status menu (if you're not already there) with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). Now jump to the last setting with a dots 4-5-6-chord. You'll hear, "Reverse advance off". Write a y to reverse the setting. Then exit the Status menu with an e-chord. You should be back in the only file we've explored so far, the Help file. Read through the Help file with the advance bar, tapping each end of the advance bar to see which way the display is moving. We think you'll see the display move forward when you tap the left end of the advance bar, and move backward when you tap the right end of the advance bar. Clearly, using the advance bar in reverse is a personal preference. Chances are, if you're right-handed, you'll probably want to change the setting back to "off" in the Status menu so tapping the right end of the advance bar moves forward and tapping the left end moves backward. It's up to you. * 1.4.5 The Parameters Menu The Parameters menu works the same way as the Options menu. From anywhere within your currently open file, enter the Parameters menu with a p-chord. The Braille Lite says and displays, "Enter parameter". Cycle through the numerous choices in this menu, forward with dot 4-chords and backward with dot 1-chords. You can see the current choice with a c-chord. Jump to the last choice with a dots 4-5-6-chord and back to the first choice with an l-chord. Many of the choices available in the Parameters menu are also available in the Status menu. The major difference between the two menus is that the Status menu tells you how a setting is currently set; whereas, the Parameters menu simply expects you to change a setting. You select a setting to change by pressing an e-chord when you see it and hear it spoken. For practice only, let's cycle through the settings. From your currently open file, the Help file, press a p-chord. At the prompt, "Enter parameter", press a c-chord to hear the first choice, "Add linefeeds". Again, don't worry that you may not know what that means. You'll find out soon enough. Now press dot 4-chords and dot 1-chords to cycle forward and backward through this menu. The last choice should be, "Serial number". Since we don't really want to do anything in particular for now, just press a z-chord at any time to return to your currently open file, the Help file. Should you press an e-chord on a choice, don't fret. Again, just get out with a z-chord and nothing will happen. As we pointed out in the beginning of this section on menus, we'll get into the specific choices of each menu when we need them as we learn how to use the features of the Braille Lite. For now, just remember that when you first turn on the Braille Lite, you'll always be in the last file you worked on wherever you had left off in that file. If you want to do something from a menu, you have to issue a command to get to it. What's nice is that when you're finished using the menu, the Braille Lite remembers to put you right back into your file, just where you last were in that file. Now let's move on to setting up the Braille Lite's voice to your taste. If you're used to listening to speech synthesizers, the factory settings may seem slow and cumbersome. You can change them to make the voice talk just as you like it. CHAPTER 2: MAKING THE BRAILLE LITE TALK THE WAY YOU WANT Before we look at the files that come in the Braille Lite from the factory, let's get the unit talking in the way that is most comfortable for you. You can adjust the speech in the Braille Lite in several ways: not only can you adjust the volume, the rate of speech, pitch, and tone of the voice, you can also adjust how the Braille Lite handles the announcement of punctuation and numbers. To change any of these speech parameters, we need to bring up the Speech Parameters menu. Press ar-sign-chord (dots 3-4-5-chord) to open the Speech Parameters menu. The Braille Lite prompts you with, "Set speech parameters" and waits for you to enter an option. Should you enter an option that the Braille Lite does not recognize, it prompts you with, "Invalid parameter" and waits for you to try again. To exit this menu, as you exit all menus in the Braille Lite, press an e-chord and the Braille Lite says, "Exit". On the braille display, you'll see, "Set speech". Tap the advance bar to see, "parameters". If you happen to tap the advance bar again, you'll see, "Invalid parameter" because the prompt was only "Set speech parameters" and you have pressed a key that is not recognized by the Speech Parameters menu - namely, the advance bar. The first time you tapped the advance bar, the Speech Parameters menu didn't pay attention since the Braille Lite could tell that you were reading a message on the braille display. But once you completed reading the message, the Braille Lite's Speech Parameters menu did take note that you tapped the advance bar and let you know that it considers this an invalid choice. As you'll see shortly, when you tap the advance bar one time too many while reading a message and you're working in a particular file, the Braille Lite simply returns you to that file and does not say, "Invalid parameter". It's only because you're in a menu right now that this message appears if you tap the advance bar - or any other invalid key, for that matter. Let's run through the options available in the Speech Parameters menu: 2.1 Volume, Speech Rate, Pitch, and Tone The speech parameters for volume, speech rate, pitch, and tone are easy to remember and to change. To make the Braille Lite talk louder, press dot 4; faster, dot 5; in a higher pitched voice, dot 6; with a higher tone, dots 5-6. Conversely, to make the Braille Lite talk softer, press dot 1; slower, dot 2; in a lower pitched voice, dot 3; in a lower tone, dots 2-3. Each time you press one of the above dot commands, the Braille Lite announces what you have done while producing the desired effect. So, for example, when you press dot 4, the Braille Lite says, "Louder" in a louder voice. When you press dot 2, it says, "Slower" in a slower voice, and so on. Naturally, there is a limit on how soft/loud and how fast/slow, and even how high or low you can make the voice. If you go too far in the "Softer" direction for volume, for example, you'll stop hearing the Braille Lite announce "Softer". Don't panic. Just press dot 4 a couple of times to bring the volume back to where you can hear it again. Notice that we have not said, "Press dot 4-chord, dot 2-chord" or whatever. You are already in the menu since you pressed an ar- sign-chord. The Braille Lite knows that you are in a menu. Until you press an e-chord, the Braille Lite thinks that any keys you press are attempts to make a choice in the Speech Parameters menu. Experiment with the volume, rate of speech, pitch, and tone to find a set of levels that is comfortable for you. The Braille Lite remembers how you've set these parameters and keeps the voice set just as you leave it when you exit the menu, and even after you turn off the unit and turn it on again. If you decide to return to the factory settings for speech, or anything else for that matter, there is a way to do that. We'll show you how later. 2.2 Announcement of Punctuation and Numbers * Of course, changing the way the Braille Lite's voice announces punctuation marks, and changing how it announces numbers, are both irrelevant issues in terms of the braille display. However, as you'll se, you can also change how the braille display shows you the contents of a file. We'll get into the specifics of how to control what the braille display shows you in Section II. For now, let's just concentrate on the Braille Lite's voice. Another set of speech parameters that you can change to your liking is the way the Braille Lite's voice announces punctuation marks and numbers. If you want to hear total announcement of punctuation marks - all of them, regardless of what and where they are - write the letter t (total punctuation). To hear most punctuation announced, write the letter m and to hear only some punctuation, write the letter s. If you want to hear no punctuation announced whatsoever, write the letter z. Remember, none of these settings is permanent. You can change them at any time. The Braille Lite has two options for pronouncing numbers. You may prefer to hear numbers spoken as digits or as full words. Write the letter n to switch between these two modes. For example, if you write the letter n and the Braille Lite says, "Say full numbers", this means that when you are reading a number, the Braille Lite will say the number, in words like "two thousand". If you write the letter n again from within the Speech Parameters menu, the Braille Lite prompts you with, "Say digits". The next time you read a number, the Braille Lite will pronounce each digit, like "two zero zero zero". * You'll probably want to set the Braille Lite most of the time to read in digits mode since phone numbers and addresses, zip codes and the like, are easier to listen to as digits. If you keep numerical data, such as money information for your bank account, in your Braille Lite, chances are, you'll want the Braille Lite to pronounce full numbers to you when working with that kind of data. But of course, remember that you can always just look at the numbers with the braille display and not even worry about how the voice may pronounce them. There are several other speech options available from the menu, which we'll talk about in Section 15.6. They have more complicated uses. For now, the basic speech parameters outlined here will get you started using the Braille Lite with the most comfort able voice for you. * 2.3 Using the Braille Display Instead of the Voice There are times you may want to deactivate either the voice or the braille display. For example, if you're in a meeting, it might be more practical to operate the unit just with the braille display and without the voice. At other times - say, when you're just reading through a long file nonstop - listening might be more practical. It can really be just a matter of preference. Recall from Section 1.1 that you can eliminate the Braille Lite's voice by turning on the Braille Lite while holding down the dots for the braille letter b. We also said that you can restore the voice and eliminate the braille display by holding down the dots for the letter s when you turn on the unit. But what if you don't want to turn the unit off to make this choice? There are two methods for changing between the two modes: through the Options menu and through the Status menu. Let's look at them one at a time. Firstly, the Options menu we examined briefly in Section 1.4.1 provides a couple of settings that let you switch between braille and speech. Enter the Options menu with an o-chord and then write the letter v to turn the voice off and turn control over to the braille display. The braille display shows, "Speech off". Press an o-chord followed by the letter b to turn the display off and turn control over to the voice. The voice says, "Braille display off." A quick way to regain both the braille display and the voice simultaneously is to press an o-chord and cycle to either the Braille Display or the Speech choice in the Options menu, then press an e-chord. Secondly, the Status menu we looked at in Section 1.4.2 also has settings for Braille Display and Speech. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). Press an s-chord and you'll hear, "Speech on". Write a letter n to turn off the speech. You'll immediately see, "Speech off" on the braille display but hear nothing spoken. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. To restore speech, you can either use one of the methods described above, or you can re-enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord. If you haven't done anything with the Status menu since you turned speech off, you'll be right at the setting for turning on and off the speech. If you're not there, press an s-chord. When you see, "Speech off" on the display, write the letter y and you'll immediately hear, "Speech on." Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. You can of course reverse these commands. In other words, you can turn the braille display off by entering the Status menu and jumping to that setting with a b-chord. You hear, "Braille display on". Write the letter n. The Braille Lite says, "Braille display off" and you'll see an empty braille display until you turn it on again. As always, exit the Status menu with an e-chord to continue working with the Braille Lite. Whichever way you use to switch between speech and braille doesn't really make a difference. It's just a matter of what's most convenient at any given time. Each method works with the others. So, if you turn speech off while you're in the Status menu, you can turn it back on through the Options menu instead, if that's easier at the time, or you can turn speech back on the next time you power up the unit by holding down the letter s as you turn on the unit. What's most important to remember in this switching business is that the Braille Lite remembers how you last set it when you next turn it on. So if you had speech turned off and then turn the Braille Lite off, the next time you power up, the speech will still be off unless you do something specific to turn it on again. The same is true for the braille display. * 2.4 The Concept of Toggling In Section 1.4.2 where we discussed the Status menu, we learned that there are many settings in the Braille Lite to help you do a wide variety of things. Some of these settings can be "toggled" without ever entering the Status menu. This is handy when you want to change a setting "on the fly" just temporarily, or even just because you're in a hurry. Toggling simply reverses a setting to the opposite of how it is presently set. Of course, the advantage of the Status menu is that you're told the status of the setting and are given the opportunity to change it. Toggling assumes that you know how something is set and that you simply want its opposite. For settings that are "on/off" switches, as are most of the settings in the Status menu, it's pretty easy to tell how something is currently set. But some are not so obvious, in which case, it might be better to check their status by bringing them up through the Status menu. Two simple examples of obvious settings that can be toggled are whether speech is on and whether the braille display is on. Toggle speech by tapping the advance bar together with the letter s. Toggle the braille display by tapping the advance bar together with the letter d. Don't confuse these toggles with chording. Remember that chording happens by holding down the spacebar together with some combination of dots. Toggles work by tapping the advance bar and some combination of dots. Now that we've dispensed with all these preliminaries, you are finally ready to start reading and writing files. SECTION II: WORKING WITH YOUR FILES INTRODUCTION Before we can begin reading or writing anything in a file on the Braille Lite, we need to talk about braille translation and ASCII. The Braille Lite has a built-in braille translator for Grade 2 and Grade 1 braille. You may have heard the term "ASCII" (pronounced askee) from computer users. ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange - is a code used by most computers today that are accessible to blind users. You need to become familiar with some of this code in order to respond to prompts in the Braille Lite. But wait! Don't panic. Basically, the ASCII character set consists largely of all the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks you already know. You'll probably not need to learn the rest of the ASCII character set, unless you're into writing Greek letters and other unusual symbols. The braille equivalent of ASCII (known as computer braille code) consists of the braille alphabet you already know plus some twists for punctuation and numbers. It's important that you be able to write punctuation marks in computer braille because they differ from those you know in Grade 1 or Grade 2 braille. This also becomes important when reading the braille display in computer braille, which may happen depending on how you have the unit set to display braille. In addition, the digits 0 through 9 are written in the four lower dots of the braille cell. 1 is a "dropped A", 2 a "dropped B", etc. You don't need to precede any of these "dropped" numbers by a number sign. Punctuation marks differ from those used in literary braille, but they are easy to learn. (See Appendix D at the back of this manual for a complete list of computer braille equivalents to the braille ASCII character set.) For the most part, you write in Grade 2 braille and the Braille Lite translates automatically to speak back what you brailled but it does display the braille exactly as you wrote it. You must be in the appropriate braille translation mode for you to hear words spoken correctly, instead of gibberish. The Braille Lite comes from the factory with braille translation set to "off", except for the "calendar" file, where braille translation is set to "on". If braille translation is set to "on", the Braille Lite assumes that the contents of the currently open file is Grade 2 braille and it translates accordingly. For now, just remember that the Help file we're using for practice, included in your Braille Lite from the factory, is a file that has braille translation set to "off". After we discuss how to read what's in a file, we'll come back to this issue of braille translation to show you how to switch between modes. Now let's find out how to read what's in your Braille Lite. CHAPTER 3: READING YOUR FILES You have control over how much of the text in a file the Braille Lite reads to you at any one time. You can command the Braille Lite to read by paragraphs, by sentences, line by line, word by word, even character by character. Or, if you prefer, you can command it to read the entire contents of a file without stopping. The Braille Lite can spell a word for you. You can specify how much punctuation you want announced as you read. It can even read you the translation of many of the Grade 2 braille contractions - for example, "in" for the Grade 2 contraction represented by dots 3-5. As easy as it is to change how much punctuation is announced and to check on the spelling of a word with speech, you can always avoid dealing with it altogether by checking the braille display. That's one great advantage of having the braille display available. Even if you had the braille display turned off at the time you read something you want to check, you can turn it on and go over that text by using the advance bar to bring the text in question onto the display - forward by tapping the right end of the advance bar or backward by tapping its left end. 3.1 The Cursor If you've ever worked with a Perkins brailler or a slate and stylus, you are familiar with the concept of a cursor, although you may not have ever called it that. In computer jargon, the "cursor", used for reading and writing, refers to the electronic equivalent of your stylus or the brailler's punching mechanism. The cursor is very important because it marks the place where this electronic "stylus" is resting. You can feel it on the braille display (more on that in a minute); but you can also move it via commands and you can find out where it is in your file and even what character is "under" it with speech, if you prefer. When we talk about moving through a file to read by sentence, paragraph or whatever, it means that we're moving the cursor to a particular place in that file and commanding the Braille Lite to read from that location. Naturally, you can move the cursor forward and backward through a file. * 3.1.1 Displaying the Cursor On the braille display, the cursor looks very much like the braille dash or hyphen (dots 3-6), except that it is displayed on the Braille Lite in the seventh and eighth dot positions directly underneath dots 3 and 6. Remember from Section I that we mentioned in passing how the 8-dot display capability can be important? Here's the first example of that. At first glance, when you see a braille character with a "cursor" under it, it may look rather strange and the character may seem confusing. For example, think of the braille letter x with dots 7 and 8 visible directly under it. At first, if you don't realize that you're reading 8-dot braille, you could mistake this for the braille letter c with the braille letter g under it. However, as you continue to use the Braille Lite and look at where your cursor is, this initial ambiguity disappears quickly. How do we get to see this cursor? Recall from Section 1.4.2 that we talked about a Status Menu from where you can change settings for a wide variety of things. One of the settings you can alter is whether the braille display shows you the cursor all the time. From the factory we have set the unit not to constantly display the cursor, as this could be confusing to first-time users of an 8-dot braille display. As we said earlier in Section 1.4.2, you enter the Status Menu with an st- sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). There are many settings available in the menu and several ways to navigate through the settings, as we discussed. From now on, though, we'll just show you how to jump straight to the one we want to change - in this case, "Cursor always Visible". When you first enter the Status Menu, the Braille Lite says and displays the name of whatever setting was last changed and the status of that setting. In most cases, settings are either "on" or "off". If this is your first time opening the Status Menu, you should hear, "Status Menu, Interactive on". The display should show, "interactive on". If you tap the left end of the advance bar, you'll see, "Status Menu". You could move the advance bar to view the numerous settings in this menu, as we did in Section 1.4.2. But now we'll take a shortcut to the "Cursor always Visible" setting. Press a v-chord and you'll hear and see, "cursor always visible off". This tells us that the setting is presently set to display the cursor only when you are writing in your file, but not when you're just reading. The only time the cursor is displayed when you're just reading is when you're checking something out a character at a time with dot 3- or dot 6-chords. Write the letter y to change the setting to "on", or, in other words, to display the cursor at all times. Now you'll hear and see, "Cursor always visible on". Press an e-chord to exit the Status Menu. Also, as you'll recall the concept of "toggling" from Section 2.4, you can toggle whether the cursor is always visible by tapping the advance bar together with the letter v. Now, take a look at your braille display. Notice that the cursor (dots 7-8) is visible at the left end of the display. Assuming that you haven't done anything yet with the Braille Lite, except turn it on for the first time, you should see something like, ("Braille Lite Help" with the cursor under the B of Braille. Tap the right end of the advance bar and you should see, "File Writing" with the cursor still at the left end of the display, but now under the F of File. You could continue tapping the advance bar and reading this Help file and the cursor will remain at the left end of the display throughout. Since you are moving the display with the advance bar, the display changes by groups of up to eighteen characters at a time. So the cursor always stays on the first character shown in the next group of characters you bring up on the braille display unless you specifically move it to a different character. If you want to see the cursor move to a character or a word to the right of the first character shown on the braille display, you'll need to use one of the commands that lets you move the cursor, and we'll show you how to do that in the next section. Moving the "speech" cursor is just like moving the "braille" cursor. The commands are identical as you'll see. If you want to turn off the braille cursor for now, however, re-enter the Status Menu with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord) and write a letter n. By the way, did you notice how the Braille Lite remembered that the last setting you changed in the Status Menu was the "cursor always Visible" setting? After you write the letter n, you should see and hear, "Cursor always visible off". Remember to exit the Status Menu with an e-chord. You should be right where you left off, except that the cursor (dots 7-8) is no longer visible on the braille display. The braille cursor will become crucial when we talk about writing in your files later in Chapter 4. For now, let's continue learning how to move around and read in the file with speech. The same commands that work for speech work for the braille display, as you'll see. * 3.2 Navigating through a File Moving through your files on the Braille Lite is much faster than turning braille pages. You can move instantly to the top or bottom (beginning or end) of your file, search for a particular word or move by a specific number of lines. Moving to a desired location does not necessarily mean that the Braille Lite will speak what is there, however. When we talk about "moving", we mean just that - moving the cursor from one location to another. It's like lifting a pencil off of one place on a piece of paper, and then placing it somewhere else, perhaps on the same page, perhaps on another. Let's practice moving around the Help file that is open automatically the first time you turn on your Braille Lite. To move to the top or beginning of the file, press an l-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Top of file" and displays the first group of up to eighteen characters of the file. To move to the bottom or end of the file, press a dots 4-5-6-chord. The Braille Lite says, "End of file" and displays the last group of up to eighteen characters in the file. Once again, notice that the Braille Lite does not speak any text, simply tells you where your cursor is in the file. Knowing where your cursor is in a file becomes crucial, as you'll see, in writing. The Braille Lite remembers where you left off in each file, even after you turn it off and turn it on again. Whenever you reopen a file, your cursor will be wherever you last used it in that file. Now suppose you know how many lines you want to move forward or backward in your file. Press a number-sign-chord (dots 3-4-5- 6-chord). The Braille Lite asks, "Enter number of lines to move". Write a number, using the "dropped" braille notation we discussed at the beginning of this section, followed by an e-chord (to execute the command). To move backward a number of lines, simply respond to the prompt by writing a minus sign (dots 3-6) before the number, followed by an e- chord. The Braille Lite moves the cursor backward or forward the number of lines you request and reads you the line where the cursor is now resting. What you see on the braille display is a little different. When you press a number-sign-chord and the Braille Lite speaks the prompt, "Enter number of lines to move?", the display shows you, "Enter number of ". Tap the advance bar forward once to see "lines to move?" Notice that the text of the braille display is not exactly Grade 1 braille. The character at the end of the prompt is a question mark, but looks like a th-sign in Grade 2 braille, as we mentioned earlier in Section I. If you're not already familiar with the basic punctuation symbols of computer braille, this is a good time to turn to Appendix D and look them up to avoid confusion. For convenience, we'll list the most commonly used ones here: The computer braille period is dots 4-6; the comma is dot 6; the question mark is dots 1-4-5-6 (the th-sign); the colon is dots 1-5-6 (the wh-sign); the semicolon is dots 56; left parenthesis is dots 1-2-3-5-6 (the of-sign); right parenthesis is dots 2-3-4-5-6 (the with-sign); the slash is dots 3-4 (the st- sign). If you accidentally tap the advance bar once more beyond the end of the prompt - in this case, "lines to move?" - you'll see and hear, "abort". It's as if you had canceled the command with a z-chord. (Remember that z-chord aborts just about any command.) Tapping the advance bar still another time simply returns you to wherever you were in the file. Since our focus for the moment is on reading with the Braille Lite's voice though, let's go on with that. Enough with the suspense. Let's look at how to read what's in the Help file. * 3.3 Reading Blocks of Text The commands for reading with the voice on the Braille Lite are very easy to remember because they revolve around the position of the spacebar on the physical unit. To read the line, word or character where your cursor is currently resting, press a c-chord for current line, press a dots 2-5-chord for current word and press a dots 3-6-chord for current character. To move the cursor and read forward or backward by a line, word or character, press a dot 4-chord for next line and a dot 1-chord for previous line, press a dot 5-chord for next word and a dot 2-chord for previous word, and press a dot 6-chord for next character and a dot 3-chord for previous character. Notice how moving the cursor forward involves chords with the keys to the right of the spacebar and moving the cursor backward involves chords with the keys to the left of the spacebar. Another way to think of it is to say that chords involving dots closest to the spacebar are for lines, chords using the middle dots are for words and chords using the dots furthest from the spacebar are for single characters. If you want to move to the next or previous paragraph from where you are in your file, press a dots 5-6-chord for the next paragraph and a dots 2-3-chord for the previous one. The Braille Lite moves the cursor to the next or previous paragraph and reads you the first line of that paragraph. Again, notice that forward cursor movement involves a chord to the right of the spacebar and backward cursor movement involves a chord to the left of the spacebar. If you want the Braille Lite to read you the entire contents of a file, or if you want to read from where you are in the file all the way to the end of the file, press an er-sign-chord (dots 1-2-4-5-6-chord). The Braille Lite starts reading from your current cursor location, whether at the beginning of the file or not, and continues nonstop to the end of the file. Pressing a z- chord automatically halts the voice. If you're reading nonstop through a file and decide you want to stop at some particular word, pressing an e-chord shuts up the voice, and pressing a 2-5- chord stops the voice and reads you the word where the cursor is now resting. While you can't control the exact word on which the voice stops, you can control how close it stops to the word where the cursor is resting. The Status menu setting, Speak Words in Say-All mode, can make a difference. If the setting is turned off, speech is fairly smooth. Pressing an e-chord to halt speech places you at the beginning of a line of text, not necessarily anywhere near the last word you heard. If the setting is turned on, speech is somewhat choppy, but pressing an e-chord to halt speech places you pretty close to the last word you heard (if not right on it), depending on how fast a speech rate you have set. The faster your speech rate is set, the harder it is to halt it just exactly where you want. But you can get quite close. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). The Braille Lite says, "Status Menu" followed by the setting you last selected. Jump to the Speak Words in Say-All Mode setting by writing a right parenthesis (dots 2-3-4-5-6) in computer braille code. From the factory, this parameter is set to "off". Write a letter y to turn it on and exit the Status menu with an e- chord. Then go ahead and read from wherever you are in the currently open file with an er-sign-chord. Notice that the speech is somewhat jerky as you listen. Now press a dots 2-5-chord to stop the voice and check where it stopped. It should be either right on or very close to the last word you heard. You can turn the feature off again to regain a smoother speech quality by re-entering the Status menu and writing a letter n in response to the prompt for the Speak Words in Say-All mode. Then exit with an e-chord. This is an excellent time to talk about the scrolling option on the braille display. * 3.3.1 Scrolling the Braille Display Wouldn't it be nice if the braille display could move by itself as you read a long file? That's what scrolling does. You know how to turn off the voice from our discussion in Section 2.3. When you turn the voice off and issue an er-sign-chord to read from the cursor to the end of the currently open file, the display starts scrolling. By scrolling, we mean that the display moves for you every couple of seconds so that you don't have to keep tapping the advance bar. This can be great if you're reading a very long file. Of course, you can stop the display at any time by pressing any chord, and you can change the rate at which the display scrolls. Press dot 5 to speed up scrolling, dot 2 to slow it down. If you happen to tap the advance bar or press another key accidentally, you'll see, "Invalid input". Tapping the advance bar again returns you to where you had stopped scrolling in the file. To continue scrolling, simply press er-sign- chord again. You might run into a situation where you're scrolling along in a lengthy file and want to skip ahead a bit. You could always stop scrolling altogether by pressing some chord, then search for the text you want to read, and then resume scrolling with another er-sign-chord. But you could also just let the display keep scrolling automatically and press the spacebar repeatedly to jump the display to the next display's worth of characters. In other words, if you don't want to speed up the scrolling rate, but you find yourself on text you don't need to read, just press the spacebar a few times to move the display along a bit faster temporarily. Then when you see text you do want to read, stop pressing the spacebar to allow scrolling to continue by itself. As with virtually all the settings on the Braille Lite, the unit remembers how you last set scrolling, and resumes scrolling at that pace the next time you issue the command that starts the display scrolling. But if you turn off the Braille Lite, the next time you turn on the unit and activate scrolling, the scrolling speed is back at the default speed set from the factory. Note that scrolling works only if the voice is turned off. If the voice is turned on, issuing an er-sign-chord simply causes the voice to begin reading from your cursor location to the end of the file. The braille display stays put. If you halt the voice by pressing any key, the display jumps to some point close to the last word you heard spoken. Whether speech is on or not, you can also scroll the braille display manually one character at a time. In other words, if you want the display to shift by a single character, rather than by an entire display's worth of characters at a time, hold down the advance bar. Then press dot 6 repeatedly to move the display right by one character at a time or dot 3 repeatedly to move it left by one character at a time. It's important to not release the advance bar as you press dot 6 and/or dot 3. Otherwise, if you treat this command like a chord (where you simply press keys simultaneously and release them all at once), the display won't scroll as we suggest. This type of scrolling by a single character at a time is useful mostly in cases where you have a string of characters without spaces longer than eighteen characters (the limit of the display). Computer programming code, some spreadsheet formulas, and mathematical expressions, for example, can create lengthy strings of characters like this. Though this method of reading the display may appear tedious, if meticulous attention to every character in a string is crucial, this method is probably the best. * 3.3.2 Defining Blocks of Text This is a good a time as any to talk about the Braille Lite's definition of "line" and "sentence". The Braille Lite defines a "line" and "paragraph" based on the location of carriage returns or carriage return/linefeed pairs. (On a physical piece of paper, a carriage return moves you to the beginning of a line and a linefeed moves you down a line. You don't need linefeeds in a Braille Lite document. You'll see why later.) The Braille Lite sees all text between one carriage return and the next as a single "line" of text. It defines a "paragraph" to be all text between a set of two or more carriage returns and the next. It defines a "sentence" to be all text between one period, question mark, or exclamation point and the next instance of one of these punctuation marks. By the way, the Braille Lite may issue a "plink" sound when you run across a set of two or more carriage returns. If you don't want to hear this, from anywhere in your currently open file, press an and-sign-chord (dots 1-2-3-4-6- chord). The Braille Lite says, "Skip blank lines, enter y or n". Write a letter y. From now on, you won't hear any distinguishing sound to tell you that you've passed over extra carriage returns. (You can also change this setting from within the Status menu with the same and-sign command. See Appendix B.) In addition to reading by lines or sentences, you can read by blocks of text from 20 to 80 characters in length, referred to as "windows". (This is most useful when interacting with a computer or modem. See Chapter 15.) You can choose among these three reading modes: windows, lines, or sentences. To switch among modes, press a w-chord from anywhere in your currently open file. The Braille Lite says, "Speak windows, lines, or sentences". Whichever option you choose, a w, l or s, the Braille Lite says, "Okay". From then on, it will read you text in the mode you selected. Notice that you don't have to enter an e-chord to execute the command to switch among reading modes. This is one case where you don't need it. The Braille Lite simply places you in your selected mode when you respond to the prompt. You can cycle among the three modes in a flash as you read. And the Braille Lite even remembers the mode you selected last the next time you turn it on. As with reading lines, you move forward or backward a window or sentence at a time by pressing a dot 4-chord to move forward and a dot 1-chord to move backward. And of course, to read the current window or sentence, simply press a c-chord. Note: If you select the window option, you must also select the length of the window, preset to 80 from the factory. You can see its current setting by entering the Status menu with an st-sign-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Status menu" and something like, "Interactive on". (Don't worry about that prompt right now. Just remember that whenever you enter the Status menu, besides the prompt confirming that you've entered it, you hear a prompt for the status of whatever setting you last checked.) For now just write a w to hear "window length 80". You may change the setting at this time to any number between 18 and 80 and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite confirms your change by repeating it to you. Press another e-chord to exit the Status menu. Or, you can simply change the window length parameter from the Parameters menu by pressing a p-chord. At the "Enter parameter" prompt, write a w to hear "window length 80". The number depends on how the parameter was set last. Change it to a number between 18 and 80 and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Okay" to confirm. Now let's turn to another reading capability of the Braille Lite. * 3.3.3 Having the Voice Spell Out Words What if you have the braille display turned off and need a word spelled? Move your cursor to the word by pressing dot 2-chords (to go backward) or dot 5-chords (to go forward) until the cursor is resting on the word you want spelled. Press the chord for current word (dots 2-5-chord) twice to have the word spelled. In fact, you can continue having every word spelled as you move back and forth with dot 2-chords and dot 5-chords. Exit this "spelling" mode with any other chord. What if you have the braille display turned off and need to identify a letter or braille character that is unclear? Letters like B, D, G, P, T, V and Z may sound alike when pronounced by a speech synthesizer. Press a dots 3-6-chord, the command to read the current character, twice to hear a clarification of the letter. The Braille Lite first pronounces the letter and then gives you a word that starts with that letter for clarity. So, for example, say you're on the letter c. Press dots 3-6-chord twice. The first time you hear, "c". The second time you hear, "Charlie". Pressing dot 3- or dot 6-chords now speaks each letter as a clarifying word, like "bravo" for b or "delta" for d. Exit this mode with any chord other than another dots 3-6-chord. If you press dots 3-6-chord three times in a row, the Braille Lite speaks the ASCII value of the character under the cursor - for example, 65 for the uppercase letter A or 97 for the lowercase letter a. (ASCII values are most meaningful to programmers, so don't worry if you don't understand the term or these two examples. A complete listing of ASCII values is in Appendix D along with the computer braille code.) You can go along pressing dot 3- and dot 6- chords in this ASCII value mode if you like. Most of us, though, will probably just exit such a mode quickly by pressing any other chord to get back to friendlier-sounding, regular letters, punctuation, and such. Take a few moments to try out reading, using the currently open Help file. Now, let's move on to some handy reading tips. 3.4 Some Tips on Reading * 3.4.1 The Automatic Braille Translator Remember that we said we'd come back to the issue of braille translation? This feature affects the way the Braille Lite speaks what it thinks it sees in your file but it has no affect whatsoever on what you see on the braille display. Nevertheless, let's see what happens to the Braille Lite's voice if braille translation is set incorrectly in a file. Get to the top of the Help file with an l-chord. Now press a c-chord to read the current line. The Braille Lite says, "Braille Lite Help File". Press two dot 4-chords to hear, "Writing Functions", and then, "Backspace b-chord". Now let's play a trick on the Braille Lite. Enter the Parameters menu by pressing a p-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter parameter". Write the letter t (for translation). The Braille Lite says, "Braille translator; enter y or n?" Write a y to turn on braille translation. The Braille Lite remembers where you were in your file and returns you there after you're finished with a menu. So let's see what happens when we try to read the current line. Press a c-chord. You should hear something like, "Backspacewh but chord". What happened? Well, the braille translator sees the "colon after "backspace" and thinks it's a wh-sign and sees the "b" and translates it into the word "but" - that's what. However, read the braille display and the braille should look exactly the same as it did before you played this trick on the voice. You still have the text in computer braille. So the point is that if you ever get into a file that sounds like gibberish, chances are, you have braille translation turned to the mode opposite what it should be for that file. Let's get out of this, quick. Press a p-chord again to get back into the Parameters menu. At the "Enter parameter" prompt, write the letter t. At the "Braille translator; enter y or n?" prompt, write an n. Now press a c-chord again. The Braille Lite should read accurately again, with braille translation "off". The Braille Lite remembers whether you want braille translation "on" or "off" for each of your files. When you go through your list of existing files, if braille translation is "on" for a file, the Braille Lite reminds you by saying, "Braille file" after telling you its name. This issue of braille translation will come up again when we look at transmitting files from the Braille Lite to a computer or vice versa, and it is a definite consideration when sending a Braille Lite file directly to a printer. So it's worth taking a minute to practice moving back and forth between braille translation modes here in the Help file. It's safe. You can't damage this file even if you try to write in it. It is protected from overanxious beginners. When we get into writing, you'll see how you can protect files yourself. * 3.4.2 Special Types of Characters The Braille Lite can identify uppercase characters and control characters to you as you read with the Braille Lite's voice through your file. Control characters are used largely for formatting purposes to instruct a printer where to place your text. Common examples include carriage returns, linefeeds, formfeeds and tabs. We'll show you how to write them later. As you're reading along with the Braille Lite's voice in the Help file, practicing moving from line to line, paragraph to paragraph, and so on, notice that the Braille Lite uses the normal inflections of speech - pausing at commas, periods and question marks. If you move your cursor forward or backward a character at a time though, the Braille Lite reads an uppercase character in a significantly higher-than-normal pitch. If it sees a control character, it reads it to you as well. * 3.4.3 Displaying Special Characters We should stop here for a minute and look at how the braille display handles carriage returns and linefeeds. What if you have speech turned off and want to know exactly where these markers occur in your file? Whether or not you have the voice turned off, there are times when it's useful to have the carriage returns displayed, just as there are times when it's useful to hear the higher-than-normally pitched voice for an uppercase character. And there are times when it's important to know how many spaces there are between one word and another, for example, when text is tabbed or indented. There are a few things you can do to change how braille is displayed. Just to refresh your memory of our earlier discussion: Carriage returns (Control-m characters) simply return you to the left margin, and linefeeds (Control-j characters) actually move you down the page. Formfeeds (Control-l characters) place you at the beginning of the next physical page. And, in print, many times there are whole lines of asterisks or equal signs, dashes or other fancy characters, to visually block off one set of text from another for emphasis. So what? All of this seems rather meaningless right now because we're dealing with a simple, eighteen-cell braille display. But ultimately, the text you're reading (and the text you'll write later) can be printed or embossed in braille. To be able to control where you place that text on a page, or how someone else layed it out, may be crucial to creating or understanding how a document is presented. One way to control the braille display is to have it show text only up to the point where a carriage return or carriage return/linefeed pair occurs. So, for example, even if there is only one small word like "hello" that is followed by a carriage return, when you have the display set this way, that's all you'll see on the display. Enter the Status menu with the usual st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord) and jump to the setting by pressing an r-chord. The factory setting is "off". So the Braille Lite should say, "End display on carriage return off?" On the display you should see, "End display on". Tap the advance bar to see, "carriage return", and one last time to see, "off". Write a letter y to turn on the feature. Then exit the Status menu with an e-chord. From now on, as you read in the currently open file, the Help file for practice, you should notice that the display of text ends whenever the Braille Lite sees a carriage return. By the way, to toggle this setting, tap the advance bar together with the letter r. The advantage of the Status menu method, however, is that you're told the status of the setting and are given a chance to change it; whereas, you'll recall from our discussion in Chapter 2, toggling a setting automatically reverses how it is presently set. But how can you be absolutely sure the display of text is stopping because of a carriage return? It might be stopping just because there are a bunch of spaces or other characters - maybe a long word it can't fit on the eighteen cells available - and so on. A very effective way to see where there are control characters and uppercase letters involves bringing into view the seventh and eighth dots of the braille display. Simply turn on the 8-dot mode of the braille display. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and jump to the setting by writing an 8-chord (dots 2-3-6-chord). Remember that all commands must be entered in computer braille. The Braille Lite says, "Eight dot mode off". Write the letter y to turn it on, and exit the Status menu with an e-chord. You can toggle the setting by tapping the advance bar together with a dropped 8 (dots 2-3-6). From now on, as you read through the Help file, notice that there are frequent instances where dot 7 appears under a character. This tells you that the character is capitalized. Also, notice that occasionally, dot 8 appears under a character. In fact, sometimes dot 8 appears under a string of characters. In that case, the characters may be all underlined or some other fancy thing. But if an isolated character appears with a dot 8 under it, chances are, that you're at a carriage return/linefeed pair within the file. Reading 8-dot braille can take some getting used to and we suggest you keep this setting off unless you really need to check something out in particular. Remember, you can turn it off quickly enough by tapping the advance bar together with a dropped 8. The Braille Lite says, "8-dot mode off". This should return you to the 6-dot braille you're used to reading. Yet another way to see control characters - this time specifically what they are as well as where they are - is to turn on the setting that makes them visible on the braille display. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and jump to the setting by pressing an x-chord. The Braille Lite says, Control chars off". (Later, we'll talk in detail about control characters, but the most common ones are carriage returns, linefeeds, and formfeeds.) Write a letter y to turn on this feature. Then exit the Status menu with an e-chord. You can toggle this setting by tapping the advance bar together with the letter c. You'll see strange-looking braille if you've never worked with 8-dot braille, and it'll take a little practice to get used to it. But essentially what happens in this mode is that you see all your text as always, except that when the Braille Lite encounters a carriage return, it adds the letter m with a dot 8 underneath it to indicate a "control-m" or carriage return. Likewise, when it encounters a linefeed, the Braille Lite displays the letter j with dot 8 underneath it (a control-j), which is the linefeed control character. Remember, you can turn the setting off again at any time by simply tapping the advance bar together with the letter c. You'll then be back to seeing more normal-looking braille. Finally, you can set the braille display to show exactly what the file contains: all spaces, multiple occurrences of fancy border characters like asterisks, all control characters, and so on. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and jump to the setting by pressing a for-sign-chord (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6-chord). The Braille Lite says, "Display all off". Write a letter y to turn on the feature. Then exit the Status menu with an e-chord. Now, as you read through the Help file, you should see a more accurate display of what the file actually contains. For example, if the only active setting for controlling the display's appearance is the Display All setting, reading from the beginning of the file, you'll see, "Braille Lite Help File Writing Functions ..." What appear to be two spaces between "File" and "Writing" are actually control characters. Turn on the setting to see control characters by tapping the advance bar together with the letter c. Now read the same text in the Help file and you'll see that between "File" and "Writing" there are two carriage returns (m's with dot 8 underneath them). Of course, once you have all these various settings for 8-dot braille, control characters displayed, and Display All, turned on, get set to read slowly. The braille will look very peculiar. But at least you'll know exactly what you have. As we said earlier, the advantage of turning on the settings we've been playing with in this section may escape you right now. But as we get into writing text in your files and formatting them for printing or embossing in braille, knowing exactly where one line ends and the next begins, how many spaces there are for centered text, and so on, may be very important. We suggest you keep these settings off most of the time to make the best use of the limited space on the display. Unless you're checking format for printing or for clarifying the layout of text, it's not necessary to activate them. Now, take a few minutes to practice reading with the settings we've been discussing turned on before you move on to learning about how to find text in your files. * 3.5 Searching for Text in a File The Braille Lite can look for a word faster than you could if you had a printout of the file. Since you can look for text going forward or backward in your file, it's probably a good idea to know where your cursor is located when you're starting your search. 3.5.1 The Location of the Cursor To find out where the cursor is currently resting, press a wh-sign-chord (dots 1-5-6-chord) from anywhere within your file. The Braille Lite says something like, "Column 5, cursor at 119". This means that the cursor is resting on the fifth place on a line and that you are one hundred and nineteen characters into the file. If the cursor happens to be resting on a carriage return, you'll hear "Column 0" instead of any other number. Now let's search for text. 3.5.2 Finding Text You can search for text forward or backward through your currently open file. When you issue the Find command, you enter a "search buffer" - a scratchpad of sorts - until you press an e-chord. If you change your mind and decide not to search for this particular text after all, you can cancel the search with a z-chord. While in the scratchpad, you can write text (also referred to as a search string) of up to 63 characters in length. You can use the backspace (b-chord) to erase a character, just as you can when you're writing. And you can press a c-chord to see what you've written so far. Let's see how it works. Press an f-chord from anywhere within your file. The Braille Lite says, "Enter text to find". Write a search string, the word "speech", for example. The search string you write appears on the braille display as you write it. Then press an e-chord to execute the command. If the text is in your file, the Braille Lite moves the cursor to its beginning and shows whatever text can fit on the braille display at one time. If it does not find the text, you hear, "not found" and the cursor remains where you started your search. If you want to reverse the search, start with an f-chord. But when you hear, "Enter text to find", write the text, followed by a th-sign-chord (dots 1-4-5-6-chord). If the text is found, the Braille Lite moves the cursor to its beginning and reads forward to the next carriage return. If it does not find it, you hear, "not found". Although the search string does not reappear on the braille display, the Braille Lite remembers the text you last asked it to find, even from file to file. This can be a handy feature when you're looking for the same text in a number of different files. Of course, turning off the Braille Lite makes it forget what text you last asked it to find. Let's practice, using the Braille Lite Help file as an example. Press an l-chord to move to the top of the Help file. The Braille Lite says, "Top of file". Press a wh-sign-chord to see where we are in the file, just to make sure that we are where we think we are. The Braille Lite says, "Column 0, cursor at 1". Good. That means that we are indeed at the very first character location in the file. Now, let's look for a word. Press an f-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter text to find". Let's look for the word "read". Write the word "read", making sure to spell out each braille letter. Do not use Grade 2 braille. Remember? The Help file is not a "braille" file. It comes from the factory written as a print file in uncontracted braille. Now press an e-chord to execute the Find command. The Braille Lite says, "Reading Functions". Notice that it found a variation of the word we were looking for, "reading". The Braille Lite looks for the combination of characters we requested but it finds the first text it encounters that may include the combination of characters we asked it to find. If you had really wanted to find "read" and only that specific word, you should have searched for the string "space read space". For now, let's just use this example to find out whether there are more instances of the word "read" in this Help file. Press an f-chord again. Even though the Braille Lite says, "Enter text to find" again, and even though the braille display does not show it, the Braille Lite still remembers that we last looked for the word "read". So let's just press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Reads word in". We could go along in this fashion, finding every occurrence of the word "read" or any variation of that word in the file, all without ever rewriting the word "read" at the prompt. In fact, even if we switched files, we could still look for the same word. Where are we in the file at this point? Assuming we stopped searching for "read" when the Braille Lite found "reads word in", press a wh-sign-chord. The Braille Lite says something like, "Column 4, cursor at 10,838", indicating that the cursor is at the fourth place on a line and that we are almost eleven thousand characters into the Help file. * Now let's press an f-chord. At the prompt, press a th-sign-chord (dots 1-4-5-6-chord). You should be back at "Reading Functions." Press f-chord, th-sign-chord once again and you should hear the Braille Lite say, "not found". All this means is that it did not find any instance of the word "read", searching backward through the file. That's fine. We knew that it wouldn't find one. But see how important it can be to know where the cursor is? Try finding a word or phrase on your own. Move to different places in the Help file as you search. Once comfortable with the process, you'll find that you can flip through a file and find a phone number faster than you can thumb through a rollodex. 3.5.3 Case-Sensitive Searches for Text The Braille Lite disregards case when searching for text, unless you select it to be case-sensitive. To select case sensitivity in searching for text, before you issue the Find command, press a the-sign-chord (dots 2-3-4-6-chord). The Braille Lite prompts you with, "Distinguish case during find; enter y or n?" Write a letter y if you do want searches to be case-sensitive. Write a letter n if you don't. Most of the time, you won't want case sensitivity turned on for a search. Either way, the Braille Lite responds, "Okay". From that point on until you change it, the Braille Lite performs searches according to your selection. Here's an example, using our old friend, the Help file. Go to the top of the file with an l-chord. Now press a the-sign-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Distinguish case during find; enter y or n?" Write a letter y and the Braille Lite says, "Okay". Now press an f-chord and, at the prompt, "Enter text to find", write "blazie" followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite responds, "not found". Either the word is not in the file or "blazie" is not in lowercase. Maybe it's in capital letters. To make the Braille Lite let you write uppercase letters, press a u-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Uppercase". Press another u-chord to "lock" the Braille Lite into uppercase mode. The Braille Lite now says, "Uppercase locked". This is like the shift lock on a typewriter or the caps lock on a Computer. Every letter you write on the Braille Lite is now interpreted as an uppercase character. Press an f-chord. Now answer the prompt, "Enter text to find" by writing "BLAZIE" again, remembering that every character you're writing is in uppercase. The Braille Lite comes back with, "not found". What's wrong now? It looks like "BLAZIE" is not in the file either. It must be that the word is spelled with only the first letter in uppercase. Let's unlock our uppercase and try again. To unlock uppercase, press a q-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Uppercase unlocked, okay". Now press an f-chord and at the "Enter text to find" prompt, press a u-chord, then write "Blazie". Remember, since you only pressed the u-chord once, only the first letter you wrote (the "B") is in uppercase. The "lazie" is in lowercase. Now press an e-chord to see if this time the Braille Lite can find this elusive word. Yes. The Braille Lite now says, "Blazie Engineering". Well, that took some effort, didn't it? See why it's probably better to have case sensitivity "off"? Let's turn it off right now, shall we? Press a the-sign-chord. At the "Distinguish case during find; enter y or n" prompt, write an emphatic letter n. The Braille Lite says, "Okay". From now on, it should be easy again to find text without worrying about its case. The Click tip: When you have large files, you'll probably hear a ticking sound as the Braille Lite is searching for text. The larger the file, the greater the distance the Braille Lite may have to travel looking for your text, and the greater the number of clicks you will hear. But not to worry. Just be patient and it will find your text - if it is there to be found. Cancelling a Search: Even after you've pressed the e-chord that starts a search, you can cancel it with a z-chord. This can be handy with a long search in a large file. Well now. You're just about ready to start writing your own files. CHAPTER 4: WRITING IN YOUR FILES Before we can write anything in the Braille Lite, we must create a file in which to write - or, in other words, open a blank page in our "binder" and give the file a name. And speaking of pages, let's talk for a minute about the Braille Lite "Page": The Braille Lite needs to know how many "pages" you want to use from the "binder" for each of your files. Each of these "pages" can hold up to 4,096 characters, something over four physical pages of braille. What's most important to keep in mind here is that you need to define the number of "pages" you want to use in your file. The Braille Lite can hold over one hundred and fifty "pages". Remember, these are not physical braille pages, nor are they physical print pages. They are the Braille Lite's version of "page". Later, you'll see how easy it is to determine how many physical braille or physical print pages are really in your file. By the way, remember from Chapter 1 that, when the Braille Lite comes from the factory, it contains several files already. One of these is the file that holds your dictionary (called "spell.dic"). It is quite large, taking up 86 "pages" in your machine. While this still leaves you a lot of room to add your own files, you may decide to remove the spellchecker dictionary from your Braille Lite to give you even more room for other files. It's simply a matter of how you use the machine and how often you use the Spellcheck feature. Even if you do remove it, you can always add the spellchecker dictionary again later. Also, even though you tell the Braille Lite that you want, say, three "pages" in your file, you can change your mind later and add "pages" to your file or get rid of extra ones you don't need after all. The bottom line is that the Braille Lite's "pages" are each 4,096 characters worth of space. Now, let's create a file and start writing. To do this, we first have to get to the Options menu and its submenu, the Files menu. 4.1 The Files Menu Like any powerful computer, the Braille Lite lets you manipulate your files. From the Files menu you can: open an existing file and work in it, create a new file, rename an existing file, delete an unwanted file, even make an existing file bigger or smaller. One of the best features of the Braille Lite is that you never have to "save" a file. Any computer user knows how it feels to work diligently in a file, creating a masterpiece, only to have it disappear into that dreaded, computer black hole. The Braille Lite isn't like that. The instant you create a file and name it, that file is "saved" for you and anything you enter into it, is automatically saved, too - yes, even when you turn the unit off. As we have mentioned earlier, turning the Braille Lite on and off does not affect your files in any way. It's like turning a radio off and turning it on again. Unless someone has come along and fiddled with the dial, you'll still be tuned to the same station when you turn it on again. 4.2 Creating a File Let's create a file. To get to the Files menu, press an o-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Option". Now write a letter f. The Braille Lite responds, "Enter file command". Notice that we didn't tell you to press an e-chord yet. The Braille Lite is now in "menu" mode, waiting for a command. Only after you issue a command can you press an e-chord. Since our immediate goal is to create a file, let's write a letter c. The Braille Lite now prompts you for the name of your file with, "File to create". Let's call our file "practice". Write "practice", spelling out each letter, and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite now asks for the number of pages in your file with, "File size". Let's just write a number "1" for now. Remember to enter the number in ASCII or dropped number notation (dot 2) and press an e-chord. By the way, if you just want your file to contain one page, you can just press an e-chord at the prompt, instead of writing the number 1. Of course, if you want your file to have more than one page, you do have to specify the number of pages you want the Braille Lite to set aside for the file you're creating. * Finally, the Braille Lite asks whether you want braille translation to be in effect for this file with, "Use Grade 2, enter y or n". On the display you see, "Use Grade 2?" Tap the advance bar once to see, "y/n?" Let's write a letter y. The Braille Lite confirms that we have created the file by saying, "practice now open". You're in your file, a blank "page", ready to be filled with your personal data. Notice that we didn't have to press an e-chord after answering the prompt about braille translation mode. The Braille Lite assumes that if you're creating a file, you want to open it and write in it immediately. So it opens the file for you. Before you write in your new file, let's talk for a moment about file naming conventions. Filenames in the Braille Lite may be up to twenty characters in length. We suggest that you name files with no Grade 4 braille contractions. (You'll see why later.) However, if you plan to send Braille Lite files to a PC, modem, or our external disk drive, you must name your files using MS DOS file naming conventions to prevent confusion for yourself later. Briefly, MS DOS files can have two parts: a "filename" portion of up to eight characters in length and an "extension" portion of up to three characters in length, separated by a period. For example, a file could be called "address.txt" or simply "address". But it's not a good idea to call a file "phonebook" because the PC will only recognize "phoneboo" and you may think your file "phonebook" never made it to the PC when you transmitted it. More on all this in Section 15.5 and Appendix A. For now, just be aware of the concept. Back in our newly created "practice" file, we're almost ready to write some text. But we still should check out some things first: We should find out where the cursor is, how much room there is in the file, and how to get help if we get stuck. * 4.3 Where is the Cursor Don't confuse this question with "Is the cursor visible on the braille display? We're just asking, "How far from the beginning of the file is the cursor, how many characters are there between the beginning of the file and where we are? Press a wh-sign-chord (dots 1-5-6-chord). The Braille Lite says, "File is empty". And it should be. We haven't written anything yet. Try going to the top of the file (l-chord) or end of the file (dots 4-5-6-chord). Try pressing a c-chord to hear what's on the current line. The Braille Lite should say, "File is empty". 4.4 Room Left in Your File To see how much room there is left to write in your file (in other words, how much free space there is after the last character in the file), press an r-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Room left is 4,096." Good, that is the size of one Braille Lite "page" and since we haven't written anything yet, we should have 4,096 free spaces left to use. As you start to fill up the file, this number will decrease. Don't worry about running out of room, though. We can make the file bigger, if we need more space. 4.5 Getting Help You may have figured out by now that the Help file is a brief listing of commands. It assumes that you know how to do things with the Braille Lite and only want a tickler, a reminder, of the specific way to execute a command. It's very handy and is accessible from any file in your Braille Lite. Just need to jog your memory about a command? Press a th-sign-chord from within any file. (By the way, the th-sign is a question mark in computer braille. This may help you to remember that chording the th-sign means help.) The Braille Lite immediately jumps you into the Help file. It says and displays, "Help now open". Check through the Help file for what you need - with the Find command, say - and then press a z-chord to abort this procedure. You'll find yourself back in the file in which you were working. The Braille Lite displays something like, "5 practice 1pb". The spoken prompt is simply something like, "Practice is open." Let's briefly go over what the display shows. When describing a file in this way, the Braille Lite gives you up to five pieces of information. The first thing you see, even before the filename "practice", is its number. We'll talk about how and why the Braille Lite numbers each file. Then, after the name, we're missing the number of characters in the file because we haven't written anything yet. But normally, some number appears right after the filename. Then you see "1pb" to indicate that there is one Braille Lite page in this file and that the file is a Grade 2 braille file. Tap the advance bar and you'll be right back where you were in your file - in our case, the file called "practice". 4.6 Writing Text in Your File Well, we're finally ready to start writing. Write the sentence, "This is a practice file to learn how to write in the Braille Lite." Don't worry if you make mistakes. We can fix them. As you write, the Braille Lite is saying every character you braille. And, are you remembering to write in Grade 2 braille? Also, there are a couple of things to notice about the braille display. First of all, as you write, you don't see the cursor we talked about earlier in Section 3.1.1. Let's see where your cursor is now. Do a wh-sign-chord. The Braille Lite should say, "Column 56; cursor at 57" - assuming that you didn't make any mistakes and that you wrote in Grade 2 braille. We are at position 56 on the current line and we are 57 characters from the beginning of the file. Don't worry if your numbers for cursor location differ from ours. Remember, this is only an example. What's important is that the column number is greater than zero. Keep that in mind. Now do another r-chord and see how much room you have left in your file. The Braille Lite should say something like, "Room left is 4,039." You'll have to write quite a bit before you run out of room, trust us. Remember, you're using up Braille Lite space, not physical space on a piece of paper. That's what's so nice. It's going to be important to know how to format your files for printing or brailling. So let's take a look right now at how to do this before we write anything else. We'll look closely at preparing a formatted file to transmit to a printer or braille embosser in Chapter 15. Here we'll just focus on how you control what text goes on each line and each page, and in the next section, we'll work on preparing the layout of the text. 4.7 Writing Control Characters into a File In Section 3.4, we said that control characters are special characters used for formatting your files for printing. Basically, these special characters are actually codes that instruct the printer about things like, when to go to the next physical line on the page, when to go back to the left margin on a line, how many spaces to tab over, when to go to the next physical page, and so on. Some control code sequences get real fancy and we won't discuss them here. We'll concentrate instead on the ones you use the most in writing. A more complete list is in Appendix D in the back of this manual. Before we review the commonly used control characters and show you how to write them, let's backtrack for a minute to review the concept of word processing in general. Back in the days when you typed on a typewriter or a braillewriter, you were limited in many ways. You could never insert a word here, delete a paragraph there, change one word to another, copy text from one page to another, etc., without retyping. Word processing lets you do all that, true; but it also eliminates your having to worry about how many words fit on a line and where to hyphenate words, how many lines fit on a page, counting over spaces when writing in columns, setting margins, and so forth. One of the nicest features of word processing is this: the computer "wraps" words around lines for you, knows when to go to the next page, and even keeps track of the number of pages in a document. Let's take an example, using the sentence we just wrote in our "practice" file. At last check, our cursor was at column 56, or the fifty-sixth position on the line. And remember that the Braille Lite defines a line as containing everything between one carriage return and the next. But anyone who reads and writes braille knows that the largest braille page can only accommodate at most forty characters on a line. When you print this file, the Braille Lite knows how long to make each line because you will tell it with settings you control from the Status menu. (We'll show you more about that later.) The point is that you don't have to know where you are on a line as you're going along writing text. No bell goes off when you've reached a certain point on a line to warn you to go to the next line. Nothing alerts you that you're at the bottom of a page and had better take this one out and start on a fresh page. So how do you start on a new page, even if you've only written a few lines on the current page? How do you move down a couple of lines and indent to start a new paragraph? That's where control characters come on the scene. When the computer takes care of wrapping text from line to line and going from page to page, it is said to be doing "soft" carriage returns and page breaks. When you actually write a control character to force such an action, it is said to be a "hard" carriage return or a "hard" page break. A carriage return takes you back to the first physical position (or column) on a line - in other words, to the left margin. You write a "hard" carriage return on the Braille Lite by pressing a dots 4-6-chord. Write a dots 4-6-chord now into your currently open file, "practice". The Braille Lite says, "new line." Now do a wh-sign-chord. Notice that the Braille Lite says, "Column 0; cursor at 58". This is because a carriage return brings you back to the left margin of a line. In other words, your cursor is now positioned at the beginning of a line, waiting for you to enter text. A linefeed by itself only moves you down one physical line but does not reposition you at the left margin of the line. You don't need to write linefeeds into the Braille Lite at all, since the Braille Lite has a way of appending them for you. This only becomes important when you're sending a Braille Lite file to a printer or transmitting it to your computer. So we'll hold off on the discussion about how to add linefeeds until we talk about transmitting files in Section 15.1.2. A tab on the Braille Lite moves you a certain number of spaces to the right on a line; you determine how many spaces. To tab on the Braille Lite press a dots 4-5-chord. Try it now. The Braille Lite says, "Column". Write a "5" and remember to write in ASCII notation (a dropped e). Press an e-chord to execute the command. Now press a wh-sign-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Column 4; cursor at 64". In other words, the Braille Lite spaced over to the fifth position from the left margin and placed the cursor there for you to write something. Check this out by pressing dot 3-chords to move the cursor back a character at a time until you hear "return" when the cursor lands on the carriage return we wrote before. Now write, "Hello." and press a dots 4-6-chord to issue another carriage return. But wait. Don't we have to move the cursor forward to the end of the file to where we had previously tabbed? No. The Braille Lite protects you from overwriting text. No matter where you last read in your file, when you write something, the Braille Lite jumps to the end of the file and appends to it. So the "H" of the word "Hello." we just wrote is automatically placed on the fifth position of the line, just where we stopped when we tabbed before. The carriage return we just wrote after the word "hello" is now the last character in the file and anything further we write will be placed after that carriage return. Remember that in Chapter 3 we talked about displaying special characters. We suggest you review Section 3.4.3 at this point because, as we write control characters and, soon, format strings, it'll become essential to know exactly what your file contains. For example, in that section we talked about the "Display all" mode. If you turn that setting on, you'll catch extra spaces you might have put into your file accidentally, and you'll certainly see the evidence of the tab we put in just before the word "hello". A formfeed or "hard" page break control character forces your printer to go to the next physical page. This means that if you decide you want to start writing on a new physical page (not Braille Lite "page"), you can write a control character so that when you print the file, text following the formfeed character will be printed on the next physical page. To write a formfeed, press an x-chord. The Braille Lite does not prompt you at this point. Now write a letter l. The Braille Lite says, "Control l". You have written a "hard" page break into your file. Now write, "This is Page 2." followed by a carriage return. By the way, you write most control characters in the Braille Lite with an x-chord followed by a letter. Carriage returns and tabs are so commonly used that a single-key chord is provided for them. Later, when we talk about how to prepare a file for printing, we'll get into more specifics about page length, line length, and so on. All of those parameters, and more, can be adjusted as you need them on the fly. Here we should stop and talk about Wordwrapping from the viewpoint of the braille display because you may need to take wordwrapping into account as you write. * 4.8 Wordwrapping on the Braille Display There is a setting on the Status menu that controls how the display breaks up words. From the factory, "Wordwrap" comes turned off and you'll probably want it this way most of the time. As you're writing though, notice how the braille display shows the text you write. Until you write a space, the Braille Lite doesn't know where you intend the word to end, and so it appears not to be wrapping your text. However, you'll see that if you go over what you wrote by tapping the advance bar backward and forward, wordwrap is in effect. Of course, there may be times when you don't particularly want wordwrap on, especially if you're writing computer programming code - say - or if you're using the formatting character strings we discuss in the next section. In such cases, where it's important to know exactly how many spaces there are between words or character strings, having the Braille Lite decide where to break up such strings for you may be confusing. Understand that this option on the Status menu only affects the way strings of characters are broken up when they're displayed. It has no effect whatsoever on how words are broken up on paper when you print your file. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). Jump to the setting by pressing a w-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Word wrap on". Write a letter n to turn it off. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. Now read the display and you'll see that words are not broken up at spaces necessarily; the display shows as many characters as possible up to eighteen characters at a time, regardless of where a word ends. You can, of course, turn these settings off at any time by re-entering the Status menu and writing a letter n. As with other commands related to the appearance of braille on the display, you can also toggle the "word wrap" mode on the fly by pressing the advance bar together with the letter w. Now let's get into more detail about deciding where text should appear on your physical pages when you print your files. * 4.9 Formatting Text If you're already familiar with word processing, you know that you can control how text actually appears on paper. This is true both in braille and in print. You don't have to count out how many spaces are needed to center text. Even if you insert or delete whole blocks of text, page numbering is accurate when you finally print any portion of your document. You don't have to keep track of how many lines you've used up on each page for headers or footers to print out where they belong on each page. You can set up the margins however you want them and then readjust them for blocking text within your document. These are only just a few of the things a word processor can do for you. As to the physical appearance of the text, word processing can italicize text, underline it, put it in boldface, even change the shape of the characters you print. Depending on your printer, the selection of print types (fonts) can be huge. Of course, braille is rather limited when compared to the number of options you have in print. There is only one choice in braille for what an "a" looks like; whereas, in print, the choices are virtually endless. Italics, boldfacing, and underlining don't really exist in braille. But at least you can emphasize text with the dots 4-6 indicator. Nevertheless, there are many things you can do whether your document is meant to be printed or brailled - or both. You can center text, adjust margins, number pages, arrange for headers and footers to appear where they belong on each page, and so on. Therefore, although you have no control over the physical appearance of braille characters, you still have much to say about how text is laid out, even in braille. All of the things we've been talking about can be controlled using "formatting" commands. These are actual strings of characters that you write into your files to make the text come out looking as if you had physically typed it on a typewriter or braillewriter. Many of the commands we'll explore in this section work whether the file is a braille file - that is, a file written in Grade 2 braille, whether the file is written in computer braille, or whether you intend to print the file to an ink printer or braille it with a braille embosser. These commands affect the layout of the text more than anything else. Except for commands that change the appearance of characters, virtually all of them format either files to be printed or brailled.. First, let's remind ourselves about the types of printers the Braille Lite recognizes. We mentioned briefly early on that you can choose between Epson- compatible or Imagewriter-compatible printers on the Braille Lite. We chose these two printers because they are among the most popular types of printers today. What do we mean by "compatible"? Well, here we have to get a bit technical for a minute but don't be put off. It's not so hard to understand the concept. Have you ever wondered how a printer or braille embosser knows when to go to the next line, to the next page, to center text, to underline it, and so on? As we discussed in Section 4.7, you can write control characters to instruct the printer to start a new page or move to the next line. You can also write special strings of characters into your file that instruct the printer about the layout and appearance of your document. These strings are not printed; rather, they signal the printer to pay attention and perform some command. But still, how does the printer know how many lines to travel to get to the next page? How does it know when it's at the end of a line and needs to move to the next line when you don't specifically instruct it to do so with a carriage return and linefeed? Printers are always busy counting: they count how many lines down the page have been printed and how many are left to be printed (or skipped). They can therefore tell when to change pages. They count how many characters (including spaces) have been printed on any given line and how many are left to be printed (or skipped) before it's time to move down to the next line. Even when you instruct a printer to skip lines or tab across a page, or to print some text in larger letters or "fine print", the printer is still keeping track of the physical space available on each page. That's all well and good. But unfortunately, complications in the instruction process may arise depending on your choice of printer. Manufacturers program their printers to be able to receive our instructions. But most have done it in their own special way. The printer knows what to do because it has what are known as "escape sequences" that it understands. These are character strings much like the ones we talked about writing into your file but they are specific to a particular printer. So, in other words, printer x may use a certain escape sequence (or code) to perform a carriage return, but printer y may use an entirely different escape code in its internal programming to perform the same carriage return. In an effort to avoid confusion, many manufacturers are now programming printers to understand the escape codes that Epson printers and Imagewriter printers understand. So if you're printer is either of these, or if it is "compatible" with either Epson or Imagewriter - that is, if your printer can understand the same escape codes as Epson and Imagewriter printers do - then you're in business. Learning the formatting commands we're going to discuss is enough. Even if it's not immediately compatible, it may be possible to make it compatible by flipping a switch on your printer or by tricking it into thinking it's an Epson or Imagewriter. Check your printer manual, or with your dealer, or with the technical support staff of your printer's manufacturer. If your printer is not compatible with either of the types supported by the Braille Lite, you'll need to learn the appropriate escape codes for your printer to format your documents properly for printing. In that case, rather than using the fairly uncomplicated commands we'll show you here, you'll probably need to use at least some escape codes in your files. Generally, escape codes begin with the "escape" character, a control character available to you, just like the control character for carriage return we've mentioned so often. To write an escape code that begins with the escape character, press an x- chord and then write an ow-sign (dots 2-4-6). The Braille Lite says, "escape" but displays nothing since this is a character that is not part of the standard braille character set. Then write whatever other characters make up the string. Remember, this is not a Braille Lite command. So you don't end it with an e-chord. Probably a space is all you need to end the string. Having said all that, let's now return to formatting commands the Braille Lite understands and that are supported by Epson and the Imagewriter printers. All of these commands begin with a $ sign (dots 1-2-4-6). Wait, isn't that the ed-sign? Yes, but it's also the dollar sign in computer braille. It's important to keep this in mind since, when numbers are part of a string, you must write them in computer braille. Also, you must surround all formatting commands with spaces. If you don't, the Braille Lite assumes that you want to print the string because it assumes that the string is part of your text. Incidentally, in addition to using the dots 4-6-chord to force a carriage return (a hard return), or two of them to indicate a new paragraph, or a Control-L (x-chord followed by the letter l) to force the text to continue on a new page (a hard page break), you can use formatting strings. The string ' $l ' means "new line", the string ' $p ' means "new paragraph", and the string ' $f ' means "new page". Let's move on now to margins since they affect everything else. * 4.9.1 Setting and Adjusting Margins Whether you're intending to print or braille a document, you may want to adjust your margins - especially if you want to block off sections of text by indenting or outdenting it. In print, in particular, you may want to make all your text align to the right margin or to some left margin different from the one you normally use. You may want a bigger or smaller top or bottom margin. All of the formatting commands begin with the $-sign and most of the margin commands are followed immediately by the letter m, and then usually by some number specifying the number of spaces you want the margin to have. Let's take an example. Assuming you're starting with a left margin of 0 (which is literally the left edge of the page), to set your left margin to 5 you write, 'space $-sign m l 5 space'. We place the single quotes around the exact string characters for clarity and readability. When written properly the string reads, ' $ml5 '. Assuming your right margin is also set to 0 (the right edge of the page), set your right margin with the string ' $mr ' followed by a number. So in our current example, you set your right margin to 5 by writing the string, ' $mr5 '. With a starting top margin of 0, let's set the top margin to 6 with the string, ' $mt6 '. Your ink printer assumes that you have 66 lines on each page and that the bottom margin is 6. but if you do want to change the bottom margin - say, to 3 - you'd write, ' $mb3 '. Depending on how it is set, a braille embosser generally assumes that the bottom margin is on the 25th or 27th line of the page. Most embossers today are adjustable to either 25 or 27 lines. If you want to increase the size of the margin you already have, and you already set it to 5, for example, you increase it by placing a plus sign (dots 3-4-6) before the number in your string. So you'd write, ' $ml+5 '. In our example, that would now give us a left margin of 10. If you increase the right margin by 5 with ' $mr+5 ', your right margin would be 10 spaces from the right edge of the page. When you want to return to a margin you had before, place a minus sign (dots 3-6) before the number in the string. So in our example, to return the left margin to 5 (5 spaces from the left edge of the page), you'd write, ' $ml-5 '. If you want to "outdent" text - that is, have text "stick out" on a line at the margin to the left of your current margin - write the string, ' $out '. The text following that string appears to the left of where you are by one tab stop. We'll talk about tabs in detail and how to set them later in Section 4.9.3. Suppose you started out with a left margin of 5 spaces and have now increased it 5 spaces further in from the left edge of the paper, giving you a current margin of 10. Then to make the first line of text "stick out" to the left of the rest of the text, write the string, ' $out '. Text on your current line begins at the 5th space from the left edge of the page, but then wraps back in to your present margin of 10 on subsequent lines. This is especially effective for numbered items, like questions on a survey. You may have heard the word "justification". No, we're not talking about "justifying your actions". In computerese justification has to do with aligning text to margins. It really should be called "alignment". But since the lingo is "justification", we use it here, too, and the string that "justifies" text uses the letter j. Of course, text is normally "left-justified", or aligned to the left margin. Whether the left margin is at the left edge of the page, 5 spaces in (as we've set it), or however many spaces in from the left edge, text always aligns to the current left margin unless you do something specific to force it to align to something else. For example, you can tab at the beginning of a line to force text to start further in from the current left margin. When text "wraps" around to the next line, or when you force it to start on a new line with a "hard carriage return", however, it aligns itself to the current left margin. To "right-justify" text means to make it align to the right margin, however you have that margin set and regardless of how you have the left margin set. So, since we've set our right margin to 5 spaces from the right edge of the page, if you write the string, ' $jr ', all your text after that point will align itself to that margin. To return to a normal left-margin justification of your text, write the string, ' $jn '. To adjust text to align itself as much as possible both to the left and right margins (only in print, not in braille), you can write the string for "full justification", ' $jf '. The printer then apportions the text as evenly as possible across the page so as to prevent visual gaps in its layout and make it more visually pleasing. Of course, since in braille the goal is usually to squeeze as much text as you can on each line without losing its meaning, we suggest keeping your braille files set to no justification, which is the standard or default setting anyway. We just touched on the subject of page length a few minutes ago when we said that your braille embosser counts either 25 or 27 lines on a braille page. Similarly, we said that ink printers count 66 lines on a print page. Ink printers assume a bottom margin of 6, as we said above, and assume all other margins are 0, the very edges of the page. Since you generally don't want to have text run literally from the left to right edges of a page, and from the very top edge of a page, you must set these margins. If you're familiar with a word processor (like WordPerfect), you're used to seeing lines and margins referred to in terms of inches rather than physical lines or characters across a page. The number of lines and characters per inch varies according to the "point size" (height) and the "pitch" (width) of your characters. And that depends largely on font type. Even when starting with a particular font type, you can change the pitch and point size of text by making it larger or smaller for a portion of the text. Remember that we said fonts were styles of printing for characters. You may have heard of the Pyka or Elite fonts on a typewriter. Ink printers are able to produce many other fonts. The choice is a matter of visual preference and you may need to ask for a coworker's or friend's opinion as to what font looks right for your document. For example, the font known as Prestige is very professional-looking, Courier is the most common font, and Script looks almost like handwriting. All in all, it can be very confusing, and may certainly be mind-boggling if you've never seen or worked with print. The bottom line though is to consider what the ink printer counts vertically and horizontally. Generally, for a standard 8-1/2 by 11 inch page, the printer assumes 6 lines per inch and 10 characters across the page. So it counts 66 lines vertically and 80 characters horizontally. So for example, if you set a top margin of 6 and don't set anything else - such as the page length, which is set to 0 by default - the ink printer says, "Okay, I have 72 lines per page. But since I can only count up to 66 lines per page, I'll take these extra 6 lines and put them on the next page, and then I'll do a formfeed to a third page so that I can start counting again." In other words, you have a mess. You need to set a page length that the printer can understand. To set the length of your page, you have to keep that 66-line limit in the forefront. Whatever your top margin is and whatever your bottom margin is, you need to subtract them from 66 to obtain the number to which you set your page length. So, if your top margin is 6 and your bottom margin is also 6 (as set by the printer itself), your printable page length is 54. You set the page length with the string, ' $pl54 '. Let's say that you decide to have top and bottom margins of 3. Subtracting them from 66 gives you a page length of 60 and so your page length string would be, ' $pl60 '. Likewise, you can affect the page width. Use the string, ' $pw ' followed by a number to instruct the printer how many characters it should print across the page. Again, like the example of top and bottom margins, if you have a left margin of 5 and a right margin of 5, you have to subtract them from the total number of characters that can fit across a line. As we suggested earlier, for ink printers this can vary widely, depending on the font type. In any case, we'll assume that 80 characters fit across the page. So, using our example of left and right margins of 5, subtracting them gives 70 and so your line length is 70. You'd set the line length with the string, ' $pw70 '. By the way, when you increase the left or right margin, you don't have to do anything about the line length. The printer remembers that your original line length was, say, 70, as in our example. Of course, if you decrease the size of your left or right margin, you have to keep in mind your total printable line length so you don't run into the mess we described above of more lines than the printer can count for a page. Let's use our example with left and right margins set to 5 and the printer counting a printable line of 70 characters. If you reset your left and right margins to, say, -10, you're saying that your printable character count is 80 but you're asking the printer to count a total of 90, and since it can't, you'll have a problem. In braille, you probably want a line length of 40 or 30, depending on whether you're using the larger or smaller paper available for brailling. This generally means left and right margins of 1 since you can fit 42 characters across a page from edge to edge for the larger 11 by 11-1/2 inch paper and 32 characters across for the smaller 8-1/2 by 11 inch paper. Of course, your braille embosser may not give you a choice about paper size, in which case, you'd need to set up all your files to the same parameters. * 4.9.2 Formatting and the Status Menu During our brief walk through the Status menu in Section 1.4.2, we ran across format parameters as we browsed through the various choices. The group begins with the setting for Imagewriter or Epson and continues through the setting for the top margin in braille. Let's take a look at these settings now with respect to how they apply to our present discussion. It's crucial to keep in mind that the format strings that use the $-sign override equivalent Status menu settings. But it's equally important to understand that you don't necessarily have to use the $-sign strings at all. If your document is fairly simple - that is, without justification of text, without indented text, and so on - you don't need to include format strings in your file for line length, page length, and margins. You can simply set them through the Status menu. This can be especially handy when you intend to braille the document as well as print it because the Status menu lets you set both print and braille parameters for the same file. Obviously, you can't set your file up with ' $ml5 ', which you intend as a left margin for your print file and expect that the braille left margin you set to 1 through the Status menu is also in effect. As we said, format strings override Status menu settings. So, the way to avoid confusion is to use only the Status menu settings when you intend to braille and print the same file. Of course, you can still use format strings for centering, page numbering, and so forth. But be careful if you decide to increase or decrease a margin. For example, let's say you set your print left margin through the Status menu to 5 and the braille left margin to 1. Then if you decide to increase your left margin by 5 by writing the format string ' $ml+5 ', both your braille and print files will show a new left margin of 10. Why? Again, the format string overrides the braille left margin setting in the Status menu. So we recommend that you use one or the other, but not both, methods for formatting margins, line lengths, and page lengths. Here's how you set things up, using the Status menu. One particular setting in the Status menu can affect whether the margins, line length, and page length settings for your ink printer work for all your files. This is the "make parameters file-specific" setting. It's important that you understand up front that, regardless of how the "file- specific" setting is set, the formatting strings we've discussed in the previous section override any equivalent settings in the Status menu. Also, notice that we were careful to emphasize that the "file-specific" setting applies to ink printing. Since braille margins are generally the same from file to file anyway, this setting does not affect braille format parameters. So whatever settings you have in effect in the Status menu for braille margins, line length, and page length, they apply to all files you braille. However, chances are, you don't want all the files you print to have the same margins, line length, and page length. So you can turn the setting on to insure that they print out with your file-specific settings. Bring up the Status menu with the usual st-sign-chord. You'll be wherever you were the last time you exited the Status menu. So you may have to cycle to the Format Parameters grouping with dots 5-6- or dots 2-3-chords. Or, jump to the first setting in the grouping by writing an l. This brings you to the choice for Imagewriter or Epson. If you haven't already done so, choose the appropriate printer with an i for Imagewriter or an e for Epson. Then press a dot 4-chord. Now you're at the setting for print line length. The default is 0, as we mentioned in the last section. Change it to your printable line length, keeping in mind our discussion of how to arrive at the right number. For example, write 70 (using dropped number notation, of course). Then press an e-chord to enter your choice and another dot 4-chord to move to the next setting. Now you're at the setting for print left margin. Write a 5, say, and press an e-chord to enter it and another dot 4-chord to move to the setting for print page length. Keep in mind our earlier warnings about page length and write 54, for example. Then enter it with an e-chord. You can't leave the page length at 0 if you expect your printer to start each page at the right place. Press another dot 4-chord to see the setting for print top margin. Go ahead and set it to something like 6, as in our earlier example. You could stop here by exiting the Status menu with an e-chord. Or, if you want to set braille margin, line length, and page length settings, continue as above with dot 4-chords to move to each one and set them as we have shown. Then exit the Status menu with an e-chord. * 4.9.3 Centering, Tabbing, Headers, Footers, and Numbering Pages How nice not to have to count out exactly how many spaces it takes to center text or to make columns of text! How convenient not to have to count how many lines of text you can write in order to fit a running header or footer on each page and not to have to rewrite that header or footer on each page! How pleasant not to have to worry about numbering pages - especially when you edit your text so much by adding and deleting, moving and copying, whole sections of it! Let's first talk about centering text. You can center text a line at a time. It's pretty straightforward. To center a line of text, write the format string, ' $c ' before the actual text you want centered. Press a dot 4-6-chord (a hard carriage return) to end centering. If the text to be centered runs over one line, you'll need to center each line by hand. Here's one instance where checking the location of the cursor can be very helpful. If you'll recall, the wh-sign-chord command tells you where the cursor is in terms of how many characters you are from the beginning of the file, as well as how far you are from the last hard return. Your decision about where to break up text to be centered over more than one line depends on whether you intend to braille or print the document and on whether you have Grade 2 braille translation in effect. For example, if you want to braille your document on 8-1/2 inch by 11 inch paper (with a line width of 32 characters) and the text you want to center is the name of the present chapter, including the chapter number, you won't make it on one braille line. Better to cut it up so that "CHAPTER 4" appears centered on the first line, and "WRITING IN YOUR FILES" appears centered on the next line. On the other hand, if you want to print your document and you're writing your file in Grade 2 braille, remember that the number of characters may expand when turned into print. So for example, if the text to be centered includes the word "character" (2 spaces worth in Grade 2 braille), which expands to 9 spaces worth in print, you need to take that into account when deciding where to cut up what portion of the text goes on which line to be centered. Now, what if you want the centered text to repeat on each page. This is called a "running" header or footer, depending on whether it's at the top or bottom of the page. In a way, page numbers are the simplest example of running headers or footers since you set them up in much the same way as text, and since you can position them to "run" on each page. To tell the Braille Lite what text you want to use as a header, write the format string, ' $hb '. Then write the actual text of the header, including centering, and any other format strings you want to use to make the header appear as you want it to on each page. Here again, a hard carriage return (dots 4-6-chord) ends the header, just as it ends centering. Suppose you want to disable the header temporarily - say, to insert a page with a chart on it that needs a header of its own that you want to use only one time. In such a case, don't bother marking that header with the ' $hb ' string, just write it out. To disable the running header for that page, though, begin the page with the string ' $h- '. Start the next page with a ' $h+ ' string to resume the running header. Footers work much the same way, except that the format string is, ' $fb ' to create the running footer, ' $- ' to disable it, and ' $f+ ' to enable it again. Now let's get into tabbing. To set up tabs to create a table, for instance, first decide how many spaces to have between columns and how many columns fit on your page. This depends not only on the amount of text in each column, but also on the width of the page. As you probably already know, in braille this is very limited. Tables in braille only work after much planning. We'll take a simple example. Say you want three columns of numbers across a page and you know that none of the numbers has more than 5 digits in it. So you can make the space between each column 3 spaces wide. Set up the columns with the string, ' $ts ' followed by the number of spaces you want the tab to move you. In our example, this is the string, ' $ts3 '. Remember, this only sets up the size of the tab. To actually move by tabs then, write the string, ' $t ' followed by the text of the column. So a line in our example reads something like this: " 123 $t 4567 $t 8910 " If you don't need to set a tab, but you do need to start text a certain number of columns in from the left margin, write the string, ' $to ' follow by a two- digit number. So for example, if you want to start 7 spaces in from the left margin for a particular line of text, precede the text with ' $to07 '. Now let's talk about page numbering. It's ever so nice not to have to concern yourself with numbering pages by hand. But you do have some control over the location of page numbers, especially in print, and whether the pages are numbered using Arabic numerals (like 1, 2, 3, and so forth) or whether they are numbered using Roman numerals (like I, II, III, and so on), as for tables of contents. To set up your file to number pages, enter the Status menu with an st-sign- chord and jump to the "Number pages" option by writing the number sign (dots 3-4-5-6). The Braille Lite says, "Number pages, off". Turn on numbering with a y. Turn it off again with an n. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. Or, to set the page number and type of numerals to use, first use the format string, ' $pnar ' for Arabic numerals, or ' $pnrn ' for Roman numerals. Then use the format string, ' $p ' followed by a number from 1 to 999 to establish the starting page number. That's good when you're setting up a file which is a continuation of another. For example, if the present file is Chapter 2 of your great American novel, you want to start it with the page following wherever Chapter 1 ended - say, 26. So your page number format string would read, ' $p26 '. Now you need to decide where to position the page number. For braille files that are going to be printed by a braille embosser, page numbering always goes in the same place, on the top right of the page. But for files you intend to print, you have six options. They include the top left, top center, and top right of the page, or the bottom left, bottom center, or bottom right of the page. Use the format strings ' $pntl ', ' $pntc ', and ' $pntr ' for the top left, center, and right positions. Use the strings ' $pnbl ', ' $pnbc ', and ' $pnbr ' for the bottom left, center, and right positions. If you want no page numbering at all, you could also use the format string ' $pnnp ' for no numbering instead of turning off the setting through the Status menu as described above. Next is how to change the appearance of printed characters. * 4.9.4 Changing the Appearance of Print Text As we mentioned earlier, not all printers let you change the appearance of text with the format strings we describe here. Only printers that are Epson- or Imagewriter-compatible understand these strings. All printers understand centering, tabs, page numbering, and so on. But if your printer is not compatible with the two we support, you may have to use escape codes for that specific printer to achieve the same results. To make text appear in boldface, use the string, ' $bb ' to start boldface and the string, ' $bf ' to finish it. To italicize text, start it with the string, ' $ib ' and finish it with the string, ' $if '. To underline text, start underlining with the string, ' $ub ' and finish with the string, ' $uf '. Finally, to doublestrike text to make it look even more emphatic, use the string ' $dbsb ' to begin and the string, ' $dbsf ' to finish. If you want to stop printing altogether before the end of your file, for example, after the first page in a two-page file, write the string ' $ef ' at the point where you want printing to stop. And, if you don't want to stop printing, but you want to pause the printer between pages, write the string, ' $w ' to make the printer wait after printing each page so that you can insert another page, or so that you can examine the page you just printed. If you want to double- or triple-space a print document (for example, a document for school that a professor needs to grade), write the string, ' $ls ' followed by a number. So ' $ls2 ' makes your document print with a blank line between each printed line, and with four blank lines, instead of two, between each paragraph. What's nice is that you can double-space a portion of a document, but leave other portions in single-space mode by using these formatting strings. In Section 15.2.4, we'll show you a quick way to get a whole document to print double-spaced without having to insert formatting strings into the document itself. * 4.9.5 Inserting a Time Stamp on a Printed Document In Section 7.2.4, we'll show you how to insert a particular date and time into a file without having to write it in by hand. However, using format strings, like the ones we've been discussing, you can insert a "stamp" onto a printed document of the date and time the document is printed. Clearly, you may not always print a document the minute you create it. In fact, in most cases, it may be days or weeks before you need to print it. Or it may be minutes. In any case, some jobs require very accurate time-stamping, for example, a receptionist taking messages who prints a message the instant it is received. To insert a date and time stamp into your file so that the date and time it is printed appears in the document, write the string, ' $tm ' for the time and ' $dt ' for the date. * 4.9.6 Skipping Blocks of Text to Print What do you do if there's a portion of your file you don't want to print? For instance, let's say that you have a five-page file but you only want to print from Page 3 to Page 5 because the printer jammed on Page 3. Place the string, ' $( ' just before the area you want to skip and then the string, ' $) ' just after the block of text to be skipped. Page numbering should still be in effect accurately. * 4.10 Selecting your Writing Mode By this time, you may be wondering how to write so that each character isn't spoken back to you as you braille. Let's show you a couple of options. You can have each word spoken as you complete brailling it instead of hearing each character spoken as you braille it. Also, you can have the keys click as you braille, or you can have a totally silent keyboard as you braille. Get into the Speech Parameters menu with an ar-sign-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Speech parameters". Press the spacebar. The Braille Lite says, "Key Click on". Press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Exit". Now try writing something in your file. You'll hear a short click each time you press a key and the characters are no longer spoken as you braille. Enter the Speech Parameters menu again and press the spacebar. The Braille Lite says, "Silent keys". Exit the Speech Parameters menu and write something in your file. Notice that the Braille Lite is totally silent as you write. And if you try to read what you just wrote, you may be surprised. From the factory, the Braille Lite comes with cursor tracking turned on. Cursor tracking means that the speaking cursor is at the same place as the writing cursor. What, two cursors? Well, in effect, yes. Remember our long discussion of reading by words, characters, or lines, even by sentences or paragraphs, in Chapter 3? When you're reading by using the Braille Lite's voice, the Braille Lite is keeping track of where you are. We even showed you how to find out where that cursor is with the wh-sign-chord. But now that you're writing, the Braille Lite has to remember where you are as you write and where you are as you read. Isn't it the same? Not necessarily. You might be writing down a reminder to yourself but have to go back and read a date to include in that reminder, for example. As long as you don't have a silent keyboard for writing, you're okay because the Braille Lite is saying each letter or word you're writing and therefore is tracking what it's speaking. But if your keyboard is silent and you still want to track where you are writing, rather than tracking the last thing the Braille Lite spoke, cursor tracking must be on. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and then jump to the setting by writing the letter c. If the setting happens to be off, write a y to turn on cursor tracking. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. Then, still with your silent keyboard in effect, write something and then read the current word. You should now hear the last word you wrote. For those cases where you need the speaking cursor where the Braille Lite last spoke, turn cursor tracking off by re-entering the Status menu and writing a c followed by aan n to turn it off, or you can press a p-chord to bring up the Parameters menu from anywhere in your file. Write a c to jump to the setting and turn off cursor tracking at the prompt, "Cursor tracking, y or n?" Remember that you don't have to press an e-chord. From the Parameters menu, responding to the prompt is all you need to do. You should immediately be back where you last were in your file. * And what about the braille display? Well, in effect, there's a third cursor that tracks the braille display. We'll call this braille display tracking keyboard tracking to distinguish it from cursor tracking (which specifically refers to the speaking cursor). As with the silent keyboard example of writing and then reading with the Braille Lite's voice, the braille display doesn't move just because you're writing something. Even if cursor tracking is on and the speaking voice is tracking what you're writing, the braille display only moves if its cursor is also tracking what you're writing. Get into the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and jump to keyboard tracking with a k-chord. The status of this setting is off from the factory. Turn it on by writing a y and exit the Status menu with an e-chord. Now write something and you'll see the braille cursor we talked about in Chapter 3 (dots 7-8) pop up under each character you write. Since there may be times when you need keyboard tracking on or off just for a minute, you can toggle it on and off on the fly without having to go into the Status menu. Simply press the letter k together with the advance bar to toggle the setting on and off. But we suggest keeping keyboard tracking on most of the time when you're writing to be certain you're writing where you're reading with the braille display. At least, do this until you're very experienced at toggling these various cursors and modes. The choice between having these multiple cursor tracking modes on or off really depends on what you're doing and you'll probably find uses for all variations. And to complicate matters even more, when we look at transmitting data from a PC or modem to your Braille Lite, we'll have to introduce you to yet another "cursor" that tracks that data. But we'll worry about that in Chapter 15. Mostly we suggest keeping both cursor tracking and keyboard tracking on to avoid confusion about what you last wrote. While having a totally silent keyboard may be great in a meeting, you may want some feedback about what you're writing. Of course, you could always read what you have written in the usual manner, with current line or sentence commands, and so on. Or you could simply turn speech off and use the braille display by itself. But you might find it convenient to hear words spoken as you braille them into your file. Press a g-chord from anywhere in your file. The Braille Lite says, "Interactive, okay". Try writing something. Words are now spoken as you braille. You can turn this feature off again simply by issuing another g-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Off, okay". Try writing in both modes to find the one that is most comfortable for you. But you may be more interested in tracking what you're reading than what you're writing in a file. For example, if you have a set of notes in the Braille Lite to which you're responding, you might want to write your comments at the end of the file but not lose your place as you read the notes. In such a scenario, you want the cursor not to track what you are writing. Turn cursor tracking off from either the Status menu or the Parameters menu. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write a c. You hear, "Cursor tracking, on". Respond with an n and exit the Status menu with an e-chord. From now on, what you write is appended to the end of your file as always, but you'll be able to continue reading elsewhere in the file. Turn cursor tracking back on by re-entering the Status menu and responding with a y to the prompt, then exit the Status menu with an e-chord. Or, simply enter the Parameters menu with a p-chord and write a c. At the prompt, "Cursor tracking, enter y or n", write a y. The Braille Lite confirms, "Okay" to once again track what you are writing. Finally, just one more setting you might want to turn on before we move into how to edit your work. On a typewriter, a bell warns you when you're approaching the end of a line. Even though you don't have to bother with all that on the computer because it automatically word wraps for you, there may be times when you do want to know where you are on a line. Is there a way to have the Braille Lite "ring a bell" for you at the appropriate time? Not a bell, a beep. You can set the beep to go off anywhere from the first to the 255th character after the last carriage return or carriage return/linefeed pair. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). Jump to the setting for column beep by writing a q. The Braille Lite says, "Beep at column 0" as set from the factory so that no beep goes off at all. Change the setting to some number between 0 and 255 (best to set it to something like 70 for a print file, or 40 for a braille file). The only times you might want to set it to something longer is for computer programming code, perhaps. Write the number in dropped number notation, as always when answering a prompt from the Braille Lite with numbers. Then press an e-chord for the Braille Lite to accept your change, and another e-chord to exit the Status menu. From now on, as you write, whenever you pass over the column you set - say, 70 - the Braille Lite beeps to let you know. Turn off column beeping by resetting it to 0. Practice writing. Don't worry about braille mistakes for now. We can fix them, as you'll see in the next chapter. CHAPTER 5: EDITING TEXT Like any good word processor, the Braille Lite lets you revise what you have written. You can overwrite text, insert new text in between existing blocks of text, even delete text you no longer want. The Braille Lite takes care of moving text aside to make room for new text you're inserting, and it squeezes things back together again should you decide to get rid of some text. And, as we alluded to earlier, it takes care of reformatting your pages so the layout of your text still looks fine when you print. First, let's try overwriting some text. * 5.1 Overwriting Text Unless you specifically command the Braille Lite to overwrite or insert text, you're always adding to the end of the file when you're writing. You can overwrite either a single character or a whole block of text. Write a couple of carriage returns to separate this practice section from your previous one in the last chapter. Then write the words, "Today it is warm.", remembering to write in Grade 2 braille. Now move your cursor back to the second character of the word "today". The best way is probably to move back a word at a time with dot 2-chords until the Braille Lite says the word "it". Press a dot 3-6-chord to see what character you're on. It should be the "x" that represents the word "it" in Grade 2 braille. Now press a dot 3-chord twice to position your cursor on the d of "td", which in Grade 2 braille represents the word "today". We're going to change the "today" to "tonight" by overwriting the d with an n. Press an ow-sign-chord (dots 2-4-6-chord). The Braille Lite says, "Overwrite". Write the letter n. That's all. Now read the current word with a dots 2-5-chord. The Braille Lite should say, "Tonight". Now, if you want to overwrite more of this sentence, press the ow-sign-chord again. The Braille Lite says, "Continuous overwrite". All this means is that when you write a character, it replaces the one under the cursor instead of jumping to the end of the file and adding it there. So in our present example, move your cursor onto the w of "warm" (and we'll assume that you wrote it in Grade 2 braille). Now press the ow-sign-chord and hear, "Overwrite". Press it again and you'll hear, "Continuous overwrite". From now on, everything you write will overwrite the character under the cursor. To turn off continuous overwrite mode, simply press the ow-sign-chord once more and the Braille Lite says, "Off". What you hear when you're overwriting depends on how you have your Braille Lite set to respond to what you write. Review Section 4.10 that discusses the various writing modes, if you're unclear about this. Or simply look at the braille display to see where your cursor is if you don't want to depend on listening to where it is. (To do this, make sure you have the keyboard cursor tracking the display). When you do want to listen rather than read the display, basically, if you have the Braille Lite set to echo your keystrokes, when you overwrite a character, you hear first the character you just wrote, then the character that is now under the cursor. So in our example, as we start to write the characters for the word "cold" to replace "warm", you hear, "Overwrite c ar". That's because the "ar" is one braille character, of course. Now write the o and you hear, "Overwrite o m" because the "ar" has been replaced by the "o" you just wrote and the "m" is now under the cursor. If you are using a silent keyboard, you'll just hear the character onto which the cursor has moved but not the character you just wrote. You don't necessarily have to replace every character in succession. You could skip a word, a line, or whatever. You can go ahead and read any of the text in your file, jumping around with the usual chord commands you use to read. Even the Find command works while in Continuous Overwrite mode. When you're ready to overwrite something else, just move the cursor to that character and start writing. Don't worry if you forget to turn off Continuous overwrite when you turn off your Braille Lite. That, and changing to work on another file in your Braille Lite, turns it off just as well. The only thing you may want to keep in mind is that, if you overwrite the last character in your file and forget to turn off Continuous Overwrite, you'll keep overwriting that last character, instead of appending to the end of your file. But what happens if you are appending to the end of your file and want to back up - for example, over a word you misspelled. We look at backspacing next. 5.2 Backspacing and Rubbing Out a Character Finish overwriting "warm" with "cold" and then turn off Continuous Overwrite with an ow-sign-chord. You should hear, "Off". Now write the word "file". Recall that the Braille Lite takes you forward to the end of the file and what you write gets appended to the last character in your file. So, since the last word now in the file is "cold", we've just added the word "file" right after the previous sentence without a period, a space, a carriage return or anything. That won't do at all. We could simply delete this last word "file", couldn't we? Well, not the way it is now, we couldn't. It's attached to the previous word. The Braille Lite isn't smart enough to know that "coldfile" is two words. That's our mistake. We'd better delete this word "file" by backspacing over each character and deleting it as we backspace. To do this, press a b-chord. The Braille Lite may or may not say anything, depending on how a certain telecommunications setting, duplex, is set, and we'll discuss duplex in Section 13.2.3. For now though, just check out what the current character is with a dot 3-6-chord or by reading the display. The Braille Lite should say, "l". That means it back spaced over and erased the e in "file" and the cursor is now on the l. Press three more b-chords and then a dots 3-6-chord. The Braille Lite should now say, "d". That of course is the "d" of "cold". Why not add a period to complete that sentence. Try backspacing over a few more characters, putting some back and backspacing over them again, maybe even overwriting some of them. Our next challenge is deleting text. So let's move along. * 5.3 Deleting Text You can delete portions of text in the currently open file. The Braille Lite lets you delete one or more chunks of text at a time. You can throw away characters, words, lines, sentences, and paragraphs. You can delete from the current cursor location to another point in the file, or to the end of the file. And you can even empty out the file completely. The text you delete from your file goes into a temporary trash can. But that trash can is always being emptied out, so you may not always be able to retrieve something from it if you change your mind. For example, if you delete something, then insert text, or use the Braille Lite's calendar, calculator, or clock, the text you deleted is gone. In effect, the trash collector came by and emptied the trash can of the deleted text, and somebody else came by and put other stuff in it. This is why the Clipboard file is so handy, but also rather like a sieve. You have to move fast to retrieve deleted text. The Braille Lite's Clipboard is one Braille Lite page in length. As we described it earlier, this "page" is 4,096 characters worth of space. If you delete a larger block of text than one Braille Lite page, you hear, "Clipboard overflow". In effect, the trash can was full and the rest of the text spilled out. Too bad. The only text you can retrieve (if you move fast) is the first 4,096 characters of the deleted block of text. If you're planning to delete large portions of text, there is a way to make the Clipboard bigger than one Braille Lite page to avoid the scenario we just described. Even if you don't make the Clipboard bigger, sometimes you can recover from such a situation and we'll talk about how to recover data in general in Appendix A, Troubleshooting. Right now, let's focus on how to delete text within our currently open file, "practice". Since deleting text can be a tricky business, the Braille Lite makes you work a little. Move your cursor onto the beginning of the text you want to delete and be very clear about how much you want to delete. You then need to enter the "Delete Parameters" menu. * Like the other menus we've discussed, pressing a c-chord tells you the current choice, an l-chord brings you to the first choice (character), a dots 4-5-6-chord brings you to the last choice (cursor to end of text). Dot 4- chords move you forward a choice, dot 1-chords move you back a choice. You select a choice by pressing an e-chord once you're on the one you want. Or, as we'll show you here, you can jump to the choice you want. Let's start by moving to the top of our file with an l-chord. Now read the current line with a c-chord. It should say, "This is a practice file to learn how to write in the Braille Lite." Find out where the cursor is with a wh-sign-chord. The Braille Lite should say, "Column 0, cursor at 1". Now enter the Delete Parameters menu with a d-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter delete parameter". Let's write a c (for character). When we write the c, the Braille Lite says, "Character". It's now waiting for us to tell it how many characters we want to delete. If we only want to get rid of one character, the one currently under the cursor (which happens to be the dot 6 that capitalizes the word "this" in our text), all we have to do at this point is press an e-chord. The Braille Lite assumes that we meant to delete only the character under the cursor. Try that now. Press an e-chord. Press a dots 3-6-chord to read the character under the cursor. The Braille Lite says, "th". It worked. We deleted the dot 6 capitalizing the word "this". Now let's suppose we want to delete a few words. We want to get rid of the words "this is a". So let's re-enter the Delete Parameters menu with a d-chord and at the prompt, "Enter delete parameter", let's write a w. This time, however, when the Braille Lite says, "Word", let's write a 3 (remember to write an ASCII 3, a dropped c) and press an e-chord. Now do a dots 3- 6-chord to see where the cursor is. The Braille Lite says, "p". Press a dots 2-5-chord to read the current word. The cursor is on the p of the word "practice". To delete lines, at the prompt, "Enter delete parameter", write an l. To delete sentences, write an s. To delete paragraphs, write a p. (And remember that the Braille Lite thinks of a paragraph as all text between two or more carriage returns.) All of these parameters work the same way as outlined above in the examples of deleting a character and deleting words. In summary, to delete a single chunk of text, you place your cursor somewhere within the text you want to delete, enter the Delete Parameters menu with a d-chord, write the appropriate parameter - for character, word, line, sentence or paragraph - and press an e-chord. To delete groups of characters, words, lines, sentences and paragraphs, you need to follow the parameter letter designation with a number, and then press an e-chord. Incidentally, when deleting sentences, you don't have to be in Read by Sentence mode. However, when you delete lines, it's a good idea to be in Read by Lines mode - to be on the safe side. To delete from the current cursor location to the end of the file, write a z at the prompt, "Enter delete parameter". The Braille Lite says, "All?" If you press an e-chord, all text from your current cursor location to the very last character in the file is zapped away. But be aware that, even though your text is gone, the file size is still the same. It's not as if you ripped pages out of your binder. It's more as if you took an eraser and wiped out all the writing on those pages but kept the pages themselves. Oops, we changed our minds and don't want to delete anything after all. Or, we do want to delete something but realize we haven't placed the cursor on the text we want to delete and we've already pressed a d-chord. The easiest way to abort a delete command is to press a z-chord from wherever you are in the deleting process. Of course, once you've pressed an e-chord, it's too late. The Braille Lite has executed your delete command. As mentioned earlier, you might be able to recover from such a mistake if you move fast. But we won't complicate matters here with that procedure. Just know that you might be able to retrieve text out of the trash can if you haven't closed the lid yet, so to speak. What if we want to wipe out the contents of this file - sort of like erasing a blackboard. Understand that we're not talking about deleting the file itself here - just its contents. Here again, you can use the z for zapping the contents away. Let's go through an example of zapping a file's contents (or part of a file) without deleting the file itself. Get to the physical Page 2 that we created a little while ago. We'll erase everything that's on that page. First, get to the top of the file with an l-chord so that we're all starting from the same place. Find the "hard" page break control character. Remember how to use the Find command and how to write control characters? Press an f-chord. At the prompt, "Enter text to find", press an x-chord followed by an l. The Braille Lite says, "Control l". Then press an e-chord. The Braille Lite should say, "This is Page 2." Yes, that's what we had written after that control-l. Good. Let's get rid of the junk that we wrote for practice on Page 2. Check what's under the cursor first, though. Press a dots 3-6-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Control-l". Do we want to get rid of the formfeed character? No. We still want to have a physical Page 2. We just want to get rid of all the text on it. So let's move a character to the right with a dot 6- chord. Now we should be on the dot 6 of the first word after the control-l. Enter the Delete Parameters menu with a d-chord. When the Braille Lite says, "Enter delete parameter", write a z. The Braille Lite says, "All". Press an e-chord. Now the Braille Lite says, "Okay." What's under the cursor? Check it out with a dots 3-6-chord. It should be on the control-l. We suggest you practice deleting text for a bit. Write some junk text. Then move your cursor to various places within the file and delete different portions of text. Write a couple of sentences and get into "Read by Sentence" mode. Then delete a sentence. Try deleting the entire contents of the file, too. After all, this is only practice. You can't lose anything important. Next, we're going to look at inserting text. So we'll assume that you're starting with a blank practice file again. * 5.4 Inserting Text As we have pointed out, when you write, text is appended to the end of the file, unless you specifically issue a command to overwrite existing text or to insert text prior to the end of the file. You can insert up to one Braille Lite page (4,096 characters worth of text) at one time anywhere in your currently open file. In fact, there's a way you can insert even more text than that at one time, as we'll see shortly. When you issue the Insert command, you enter an "Insert buffer" - a scratchpad of sorts. This is called the Clipboard. Yes, it is that same file that served as a trash can for deleting text in the last section. You'll recall that the text is not actually "thrown away" into the trash can until you press an e-chord or perform some other function (like inserting text). Similarly, when you're inserting text, it is not actually moved from the Clipboard and added to your file until you press an e-chord. If you decide to cancel the insertion, you can press a z-chord at any time and no text is inserted into your file. Until you perform another function - like deleting text, using the Braille Lite's calendar, calculator, or clock - the text you had started to insert remains in the Clipboard. This is why we're calling it a scratchpad for inserting text, rather than a trash can, as we did for deleting text. While in the scratchpad, you can use the backspace (b-chord) to erase characters, just as you can when you're writing). And you can see what you've written thus far by pressing a c-chord. In fact, all the reading commands work while your in Insert mode. As with the trash can for deleting text, a scratchpad can also run out of room to scribble the text you want to insert. If you plan to insert large blocks of text into a file, you should make the Clipboard big enough to hold the block. Otherwise, you'll have to keep inserting segments of the large block of text no bigger than 4,096 characters each. That can be time-consuming and confusing with a large block of text. Generally, you move large blocks around when you're copying from one file to another, and we'll show you later on how to "paste" text from the Clipboard into your files. For now though, let's take a simple example of inserting text. Let's write a sentence in our empty file, "practice". Make sure you're at the top of the file with an l-chord and that it's empty with a c-chord. If it is, when you press a c-chord you'll hear, "File is empty". Write, "This is a practice session on how to insert text into a file." Let's add the word "learning" before the word "how". Move your cursor back to the word "how" by pressing dot 2-chords until the Braille Lite says, "how". Press a dots 3-6-chord to see what's under the cursor. It should be on the "h" of "how". Now press an i-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Insert mode active". Write the word "learning" followed by a space, then press an e-chord to let the Braille Lite insert the text. The Braille Lite says, "Okay". Now check what's under the cursor. It should be on the space, the last character you inserted. Read the entire sentence with a c-chord. It now says, "This is a practice session on learning how to insert text into a file". Later, you'll see how easy it is to insert calculation results or calendar information into your file without retyping it. We'll discuss those more sophisticated features in their respective sections in Section III. Practice writing text and inserting things within it, deleting text, etc. Get comfortable with these word processing basics before you move on to the next section on "cutting and pasting" text. 5.5 Copying Text into Your File The Clipboard can also be a temporary storage area for text you want to move or copy from one place to another in your file, or even between files. For now, we'll look at copying and moving text within our currently open file, "practice". To copy or move a chunk of text, you have to mark one end of it. Then you can work with the block of text preceding or following the mark. Start out with a clean slate. Empty out your file and write the sentence, "This is a practice session on learning how to copy text into a file." Follow this sentence with two carriage returns to prepare us for a new paragraph. Now let's copy the text, "This is a practice session ", including the space after the word "session". We'll put it after the two carriage returns. To do this, find the beginning of the text we want to copy. In this case, it's easy. Simply go to the top of the file with an l-chord. To mark the beginning of the text, press an m-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Marked, okay." Now move your cursor forward with dot 5-chords until you're on the word "on". Essentially, what we're doing is marking the beginning of the text we want to work with and marking its end by placing the cursor where we want to stop. To copy this marked text into the Clipboard, press a gh-sign-chord (dots 1-2-6-chord). The Braille Lite says, "Copied." If we went to the file called Clipboard now, we'd see that our marked text, "This is a practice session ", is stored there. Let's copy this marked text. By the way, notice that the text is not removed from your file. If you press a c-chord, you hear, "This is a practice session on learning how to copy text into a file." Press a dots 4-5-6-chord to get to the end of the file. Then press an ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6-chord). The Braille Lite says, "Paste what?" Write a letter c to copy the contents of the Clipboard into your file. Since you can paste other information into your file, such as a result from the calculator or a date from the calendar, you must respond to the prompt "Paste what?", in this case with a c (for "copy text"). The Braille Lite says, "Clipboard, okay". If Interactive mode is on, it adds, "This is a practice session." What's under the cursor? With a dots 3-6-chord, you'll see that the cursor is on the dot 6 of the word "This". But wait a minute? Didn't we say earlier that the Braille Lite always appends text to the end of the file? Why did we have to do a dots 4-5-6-chord to get to the end of the file before copying the text from the Clipboard? Let's find out. Go back to the top of the file with an l-chord. Press an ing- sign-chord, then write a c). Now read the current line. We think you'll hear, "This is a practice session This is a practice session on learning how to copy text into a file." What happened? The Braille Lite inserted the text where your cursor was, not at the end of the file. Text gets appended to the end of the file only when you are writing it, not when you're copying it. * Incidentally, having a mark at a significant place in your file, such as a particular account number you're always needing to look up, means that you can jump to that mark quickly. Just press a number-sign-chord followed by an m. You may recall that pressing the numbersign-chord brings up the prompt, "Enter number of lines to move." But this command also recognizes marks. Pressing number-sign-chord m immediately jumps you to the mark and your Braille Lite will read you the first line of the marked text. But what a mess we made in our example. Let's get rid of this extra garbage before we get thoroughly mixed up. * 5.6 Deleting Blocks of Text There are two methods for deleting a portion of text. The first way to prepare a portion of text for deletion is to mark one end of it, just as we did for copying in the previous section. Get to the top of the file with an l-chord and press an m-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Marked, okay." Now move the cursor to the second occurrence of the word "This". Enter the Delete Parameters menu with a d-chord. At the prompt, "Enter delete parameter", write an m. The Braille Lite confirms, "Mark". Enter an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Okay". Now read the current line. You'll hear, "This is a practice session on learning how to copy text into a file." Whew! That extra text is gone. The second way to prepare a portion of text for deletion is to block it from the current cursor location to the next occurrance of a particular word (or string of characters). Place your cursor on the first character of the text you want to delet. Enter the Delete Parameters menu and at the "Enter delete parameter" prompt, write a b (for block delete). Then write the specific string of characters that marks the place where you want deletion to stop. Press an e-chord. The Braille Lite finds the next occurrence of the string you provided and deletes everything from your current cursor location up to (but not including) that string of characters. Here's an example. Empty out your "practice" file first so we're all starting at the same place. Then write, "This is a practice session. We are learning about block copying and block deleting." You want to get rid of some text, but you don't want to start all over again. So move your cursor to the beginning of the sentence (in our case, the top of the file). We want to take everything out up to the word "we". Press a d- chord to bring up the Delete Parameters menu, and at the "Enter delete parameter" prompt, write a b. The Braille Lite says, "Block". Then write the word "We". (If your file is in Grade 2 braille, as we assume here, you should make sure to include the dot 6 which capitalizes "We" in the sentence. Otherwise, everything is deleted, including the dot 6, and your sentence will start with a lowercase letter "w".) End your character string with an e- chord. The block of text is gone and your cursor should now be on the dot 6 that capitalizes "We" and, since your cursor had been at the beginning of the file, it should still be there, except that now the first word in the file is "We". Play around with the concepts of copying text from one place to another and deleting blocks of text before moving on to finding and replacing text in your file. * 5.7 Find and Replace Text Yes, it's finally here. Those of you already familiar with many of the Braille Lite's features knew the frustration of having no built-in search-and- replace function available. In fact, we used to provide an example of a macro to mimic the function. Now the feature is built-in and here's how it works. You begin with the f-chord that we learned about in Section 3.5.2. When you hear the prompt, "Enter text to find", you write the text you want the Braille Lite to look for, but instead of pressing an e-chord as we showed you to have the Braille Lite perform the search, press an r-chord. The Braille Lite then says, "Enter replacement text." Write the new text that you want to replace the old text, and press an e-chord so that the Braille Lite knows what the new text is. Now you hear, "Replace, Skip, All." Write the first letter of your choice (r, s, or a). Selecting r replaces the current occurrence of the text you asked the Braille Lite to find with the text you want to substitute. Selecting s tells the Braille Lite to skip this occurrence of the text you asked it to find and to go find the next occurrence. When it finds that next occurrence, the Braille Lite asks you the question again, "Replace, Skip All." You could go along in this way, checking each occurrence of the text you want found and possibly replaced. Press a c-chord when you arrive at an occurrence of the text to make sure whether you want to replace it or skip it. If you're definitely sure that you want to replace all occurrences of the text you asked the Braille Lite to find, select the letter a from the prompt, "Replace Skip All". We suggest great caution - at least at first - with a "global" replacement. You'll see why in our next example. Suppose you're writing an article about the TV show, "Entertainment Tonight", often referred to as ET. Who wants to write out the full name of the program each time it's mentioned? In the days of the typewriter, you had no choice. But now you can just write ET throughout your article and then do a "global" replacement of the abbreviation when you're finished. In this particular example, what do you think happens if you replace every instance of "et" with the real name of the program. Words like, better, meet, and countless others, are captured as well and you have a lot of work ahead of you to clean up the mess. But if you had the setting for distinguishing capital letters turned on and searched only for the letters "ET", a global replacement of that abbreviation could save you a lot of time and energy. The point is that you have to be very careful when replacing text globally. It's an invaluable tool and experience will show you how to wield it effectively. Meanwhile, we suggest you practice. One especially treacherous pit that most word processing geniuses have fallen into at one time or another has to do with replacing format strings or control characters. For example, don't think you can just replace every instance of a carriage return with a space, or two spaces with just one, or a bunch of asterisks that make a pretty border around text with nothing at all. If, for instance, there are 65 asterisks going across a line to make a demarkation visually between one set of text and the next, and you tell the Braille Lite to replace every two asterisks with nothing so that you can have a braille file free of these extraneous decorations, guess what happens when you replace them all? That's right. You still have one left. See, since there were 65 of them, and you told the Braille Lite to take out each set of two, there's one left over. This is only a minor example of using global replacement without thinking it through carefully. On the other hand, the time saved in not having to write out "Braille Lite" every time we've use the phrase throughout this manual is a real godsend. We promise you. Every instance of "blt" turns into "Braille Lite. Again, we recommend that you practice writing some text and then replacing parts of it till you're comfortable with the concept. In the next chapter, you'll discover how to manipulate files themselves. But before you tackle that, get real comfortable with all of the concepts we covered in this chapter . We've covered a lot of ground. CHAPTER 6: MANIPULATING FILES As you've seen, the Braille Lite lets you create files to enter your personal data. Soon you'll have many files in your Braille Lite and will need to do things like rename them, change their sizes, and simply open them to read and write in them. You might want to look at a list of your files, delete ones you no longer need and create new ones. All of these options are handled through the Files Menu. Let's use our currently open "practice" file as a starting point to explore the Files Menu. What's the name of the currently open file? When we turn on the Braille Lite, we hear, "Braille Lite Ready, filename is open". Recall that the Braille Lite knows what file you were in and where your cursor was within that file the last time you turned it off. So when you turn the Braille Lite on again, hearing that file's name and seeing it displayed are very helpful. But what if you're working in a file and get interrupted by a long phone call, or if you can't remember what file you were working in before lunch (and you forgot to turn off the Braille Lite). Hopefully, you weren't running on battery, wasting valuable battery time. Anyway, you just want to know the name of the file that's open. You could press a z-chord - normally used to abort commands - from anywhere within your currently open file to hear its name, size and whether braille translation is on for this file. Since we're concentrating on the Files menu options in this chapter however, let's see how to find out its name from there. Enter the Files menu. Remember how we did this before to create our "practice" file? First, enter the Options menu with an o-chord and the Braille Lite says, "Option". Then jump to the choice by writing an f. You are prompted, "Enter file command". Write a t to hear, "practice, one page, braille file is open; enter file command". This tells us that the open file is our "practice" file, that it is one Braille Lite "page" in size, and that it is a "braille" or Grade 2 file. Finally, we hear the Files menu prompt again, "Enter file command". The braille display actually gives us more information than does the voice. Notice that the display reads something like, "4 practice 123 1pb". You'll probably have to tap the advance bar forward one time to see the entire message. There's a lot of information about the file here. You are shown its number, its name, the number of "bytes" or characters in the file (including spaces and control characters), the number of Braille Lite pages the file contains, and finally, a letter b if braille translation is turned on for the file. We'll explain what the file's number means later in this chapter and how to hear such detailed information about the file spoken. But for now, just focus on the fact that you can see the file's name, how big it is, and whether braille translation is on or off. Remember that we're in the Files menu now, looking at the name of the currently open file. To get back into the file wherever you had stopped in it, just exit the Files Menu with a letter e. Notice that you don't have to press an e-chord, just an e. "Exit" is one of the choices on the Files menu. Any time you want to exit the Files menu to return to your currently open file, simply write an e and the Braille Lite says, "Exit". (By the way, pressing an e-chord or a z-chord also exits the Files menu.) Right now you should have very few files in your Braille Lite: some from the factory and the "practice" file we created together. But as we keep stressing, it won't be long before you have many files in your Braille Lite. So let's see how to get a listing of the files you have and how to move from file to file. 6.1 Listing your Files From the Files menu, write the letter l to check out your current list of files, write a q to get a "quick" list (just the filenames), or write a v to get a "verbose" list (with all relevant file information about each file). Press a v-chord to copy your files list temporarily to the Clipboard. Let's check out how many files we have. You should be in your "practice" file. It doesn't matter what text you have in it right now. We'll just assume that you're starting from there. Get into the Files menu with an o-chord followed by the letter f. At the prompt "Enter file command", write an l. The Braille Lite should say something like this: "Files list; Help, 5 pages; Clipboard, 1 page; Calendar, 1 page, braille file; Spell.dic, 86 pages; Practice, 1 page, braille file; 67 pages remaining, enter file command." The number of "pages" remaining depends on the number of files that came with your unit from the factory, of course, and also depends on the sizes of your files. This is just an example. As we mentioned above, on the braille display you actually see more information than what is spoken - some of which is abbreviated. For example, the spoken phrase "1 page, braille file" is displayed as "1pb". Also, as stated earlier, you see the file's number, then its name, then its size, and finally the number of Braille Lite pages it contains and the letter b if it's a Grade 2 braille file. If you tap the advance bar forward or backward to see the next or previous files listed and speech is on, that file's information is also spoken as it comes up on the display. Notice that, at the end of the list, you hear, "Enter file command." Let's check that our "practice" file is still the currently open file with a t. The Braille Lite should say, "practice, one page, braille file, is open. Enter file command". For practice purposes, let's create a couple of new files before we look at how to move from file to file. Create a file called "temp" for "temporary" and another called "names". We'll use the "names" file as an address book later on. We'll walk you through creating the "temp" file and let you create "names" by yourself. To create the file "temp", press an o-chord and at the "Option" prompt, write an f to enter the Files menu. At the prompt "Enter file command", write a c. The Braille Lite says, "Enter file to create." Write "temp" and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter the file size". Let's make this a file with two Braille Lite "pages" so that we can play with the size of this "temp" file later. Write a 2 (dropped b) and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite now says, "Use Grade 2 translator, enter y or n". Write a y. The Braille Lite says, "temp now open". Go ahead and create the "names" file. You'll be in that file ready to write something when you finish creating it. If you like, you may enter a few names and addresses, phone numbers, etc. A good idea is to write a single carriage return between each part of an entry and a double carriage return between entries. For example, "Jane Doe, carriage return, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. carriage return, Washington, DC, double carriage return; John Doe, single carriage return, 555-1234, double carriage return ..." This way, you can move from entry to entry by simply pressing dots 5-6-chords to move forward or dots 2-3-chords to move backward. We'll assume that you're in the file "names" as we proceed with our next topic, showing you how to move from file to file. 6.2 Navigating Through Your Files Now let's explore moving from the beginning to the end of our existing files, checking out the names of each file along the way. We know how to get a list of all the files, but how do we quickly find the first file, or the last one or one somewhere in the middle? Each file in the Braille Lite is numbered, starting with 0 for the Help file. Moving to a file does not mean you can read it or write in it. All we're doing is "pointing" to files - physically moving to the place in the Braille Lite's memory where the file is located, something like finding the "tab" in our "binder" of files. When you find a tab, you check out its name and either turn to the pages within it or you move to the next tab, or the previous one, or skip to the last one or the first one in your binder. That's all we're doing here. To move from file to file, get into the Files menu with an o-chord followed by an f. At the "Enter file command" prompt, you can do the following: To move to the first file, press an l-chord. To move to the last file, press a dots 4-5-6-chord. To move back one file in the list, press a dot 1-chord and to move to the next one in the list, press a dot 4-chord. To see the name of the file you're currently pointing to, press a c-chord and to spell out its name, press a dots 2-5-chord. Does anything sound familiar in these commands? They sound suspiciously similar to the commands for navigating around a currently open file - finding the top of a file with an l-chord, reading the current line with a c-chord, spelling the current word with a dots 2-5-chord. You can memorize the commands to move from file to file quickly by remembering how similar they are to the ones you already know. The major difference is that these commands used within the Files menu point to files (reading you their names, how big they are, and whether they have braille translation active). The commands you already know take you from place to place within your currently open file. Let's practice. From your currently open file, "names", press an o-chord followed by an f to get the prompt, "Enter file command". Now press an l-chord. The Braille Lite should say something like, "File number 0, Help, 5 pages". Now press a dot 4-chord to hear, "Clipboard, 1 page." Press another dot 4-chord to hear, "Calendar, 1 page, braille file." Press a dot 1-chord to go back a file and hear, "Clipboard, 1 page." Press a dots 2-5-chord to hear the name of this file spelled out, "File number 1, Clipboard, c l i p b o a r d, 1 page". Just for fun, let's see what happens when you write a t. (Maybe you can't remember which file you last opened.) The Braille Lite should say, "names, 1 page, braille file, is open. Enter file command." Now press a c-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Clipboard, 1 page." Why? Even though our currently open file is "names", we're looking at the "tab" for the file called "Clipboard". See the difference? The file we're pointing to may not be the one that's open. If we want to open the file we're pointing to, we have to tell the Braille Lite to open that file with an o-chord. Knowing whether the file you're pointing to in the Files list is currently open is crucial. Basically, you can issue a Files menu command to affect a file in two ways: if the file is already open, you can affect it with a command from the Files menu by writing the first letter of the command (for example, r for Rename). But if the file is not open, you must point to it first and issue the command from the Files menu with its corresponding letter-chord command (for example, an r-chord for Rename). Let's look at how to open a file next. 6.3 Opening an Existing File So we're moving along, checking the names of our files and run across the one we want to open, even though we already have "names" open. We stopped at "Clipboard". That's not a good file to open because that's the Braille Lites trash can, scratchpad and temporary storage area. Let's get back into our old "practice" file. At the prompt "Enter file command", press a few dot 4-chords until you hear, "practice, 1 page, braille file." Press an o-chord. The Braille Lite says, "practice now open". We can go ahead and read or write here. What happened to "names"? How nice that the Braille Lite took care of closing it and saving that file for us without our having to do anything. This is a departure from the usual procedures you follow with files on your standard personal computer. The Braille Lite is unique in that you never have to save a file - not when you go to open another file, not when you turn off the unit. It seems simple enough to open a file by moving to it and opening it with an o-chord when you have just a few files. But think about what it would be like to have to do that if you have thirty files. What's an easier way? If you know the name of the file you want to open, all you have to do is tell the Braille Lite its name and the unit will find it and open the file for you. For instance, let's say you're in the file "practice" and want to go back to the file, "names". Press an o-chord followed by an f to get to the Files menu prompt, "Enter file command". Then write the letter o. The Braille Lite says, "Enter file to open". Write out the name of the file and press an e-chord. Almost instantaneously the Braille Lite says, "names now open". * If you're in a file and realize you need some information from the file you last opened, press an o-chord followed by the letter l to bring up that file again. You don't even need an e-chord. The Braille Lite remembers what file you opened last and takes you there, placing you at whatever point you'd stopped in that file. Pressing o-chord l again returns you to the file from which you started at the point where you'd stopped working in it. Or, you can flip back and forth between these last two files you've opened by pressing dots 1-2-5-6-chords. So, for example, if you have "names" open, but want to check something in your "practice" file (which was the file you had opened last), just press an o- chord l to bring up the "Practice" file. Then, when you finish getting what you need from it, return to your "names" file in a flash by pressing another o-chord l. Even if you turn off the Braille Lite, it remembers the last two files you had opened. So when you turn the machine on again, not only does it place you back in the file in which you were last working at the point you had stopped, it can jump you to the file you had opened before that one and place you at the point you had stopped in it, as well. This feature can be especially useful if you find yourself juggling between, say, your Calendar file and your "Names" file all the time. Now, for practice, try opening a file that doesn't exist. Bring up the Files menu with an o-chord f. At the prompt, "Enter file command", write "hello" and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Can't find that file. Enter file command." This means that the file doesn't exist or that you wrote an incorrect name. If you really think you have a file by the name you wrote, it might be that you spelled it differently. So you can move around from file to file with dot 4-chords and dot 1-chords until you're pointing to it, hear its correct spelling with a dots 2-5-chord, and then open it with an o-chord. And speaking of filenames and how you spell them, take care how you name your files. What do you think will happen if you name a file "Mary" using Grade 2 braille? The Braille Lite will let you name your file that way. It's not smart enough to know that you're writing Grade 2 braille when you're in the Files menu. Braille translation works only from within a file. What happens when a file called "Mary" written in Grade 2 braille is pointed to, opened, appears as part of a files list, etc.? The Braille Lite says, "comma m greater y." It sees the dot 6 and "ar" signs all as ASCII symbols, not as contracted braille. So we suggest that you always name your files using uncontracted braille. Oh-oh. Did you use Grade 2 braille when you created "names"? If so, don't worry. You'll see how to rename it shortly. But first, let's check out another way to open files, using a shortcut, numbers. 6.4 Opening an Existing File by Its Number As we've pointed out, the braille display shows you not only the names of your files, it shows you how your files are numbered in the Braille Lite. Did you notice when we moved from file to file that file numbers as well as file names were spoken? When we go to the beginning of the files list from the Files menu with an l-chord or to the end of the list with a dots 4-5-6-chord and even when we press a c-chord to see the name of the file currently being pointed to, the Braille Lite always says something like, "File 0, Help, 5 pages". This is because files in the Braille Lite's memory are numbered sequentially. You can have a maximum of 77 files, assuming that each file is only one Braille Lite page long. Actually, the number of files you can have in the Braille Lite at any given time varies with their sizes at that time. If you have a file with thirty Braille Lite pages - a substantial size, by the way - chances are, the total number of files you'll be able to fit in the Braille Lite will be far less than the upper limits we provide here. We suggest you create small files and add Braille Lite "pages" to them as needed, rather than have valuable space taken up with blank Braille Lite "pages". But to get back to the original point of this section: The Braille Lite numbers files sequentially. The Help file is 0, the Clipboard is 1, and so on. If you frequently need to jump to a certain file, just open the file by its number. Let's look at an example. Bring up the Help file from whatever file you're in right now. What's the easiest way, remember? Press a th-sign-chord and the Braille Lite jumps into the Help file with the prompt, "Help is open". (Depending on how many files were loaded into your unit from the factory, the number in our example may be off. But go ahead and open the file whose number we suggest anyway for practice.) For example, let's say that you want to get into the fifth file on your Braille Lite. That might be the file we created a little while ago called "temp". From the Help file, press an o-chord and you'll hear the prompt, "Option". Now instead of getting into the Files menu as we've been doing, simply write 04, remembering to use dropped numbers. (Why 04? The numbers of the files start with 0 for the Help file; therefore, the fifth file in the Braille Lite is numbered 04.) The Braille Lite says something like, "Temp now open." It's that easy. You don't even have to press an e-chord. In this case, the Braille Lite doesn't need it. What happens if you write the number for a nonexistent file, like 9 (given our present number of six files)? No problem. The Braille Lite merely says, "File doesn't exist" and leaves you exactly where you were in your currently open file. Of course, if you try to write the file's number in Grade 2 braille, the letter i, instead of the ASCII dropped i, the Braille Lite will really reject your request, saying, "Invalid input" and still leave you exactly where you were in your currently open file. The thing to be careful of in using the o-chord from within a file to get to the Options menu is that, if you write a letter the Braille Lite thinks is a real option, like the letter f we've been working with, it will take you to that option. In the case of the letter f, we already know it's the Files menu. Now let's move forward with several housekeeping file commands. 6.5 Renaming a File How about changing the name of our file called "temp" to "drill". We're just going to practice doing things to this file as if it had data, so we can play with it without danger of messing up anything important. We'll assume that your currently open file is "temp". Let's enter the Files menu in the usual way with an o-chord followed by an f. At the "Enter file command" prompt, write an r. The Braille Lite says, "Enter filename". Write the filename "drill" and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Okay, enter file command". Note that we're still in the Files Menu. To get back into the currently open file, now called "drill", all we have to do is write an e to exit the Files menu. But what if you want to change the name of another file, one that is not currently open? The first thing to do is to "point" to the file. Remember how that's done? Let's change the name of the file "names" to "address". We don't have to open that file. We just have to point to it. So from the Files menu, at the "Enter file command" prompt, press a couple of dot 4-chords until you're on "names". Then press an r-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter filename". Write "address" followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite now says, "Okay, enter file command" just as it did before. Where will you be when you press the e to exit the Files menu? Right. Back in the file "drill" because that is the currently open file. Notice the difference in the two commands just discussed for renaming a file: You issue the command with an r if the file is currently open and with an r-chord if you are pointing to the file but it is not currently open. Keep this in mind as we move through the next few commands. They work the same way. * 6.6 Write-Protecting and Unprotecting a File To guard against a serious blunder, such as accidentally deleting your address file, you can "protect" files from deletion or from being overwritten in some way. For files that are absolutely essential, it is a good idea, especially if you want to try out a new command on the Braille Lite that affects files (for example, changing its size). Protecting a file is like putting a "lock" on it in effect, safeguarding yourself against losing or scrambling its contents. The Protect and Unprotect commands work the same way as many other commands within the Files menu. If a file is already open, writing a p from the Files menu protects the file. If the file is not already open, point to it first, then issue a p-chord command to protect it. The corresponding command pair is the letter u and u-chord for Unprotecting files. Let's go through an example. Open your file called "drill", if you're not already in it. Now get into the Files menu with an o-chord followed by an f. At the "Enter file command" prompt, write a p. The Braille Lite says, "File is write-protected; enter file command." Exit the Files menu with an e and try writing something in your "drill" file. Every time you write a character, the Braille Lite says, "File is write-protected." Oh, you can read the file just fine. But now you can't write anything in it. In fact, the "drill" file has nothing in it right now anyway. But if it did, you would only be able to read its contents, not write in the file. Let's protect our "address" file, shall we? You wouldn't want to lose that. Bring up the Files menu with an o-chord followed by an f and at the "Enter file command" prompt, press some dot 4-chords and dot 1-chords until you're pointing to "address". Now press a p-chord. The Braille Lite says, "File is write-protected; enter file command". Great. Even though the "address" file is not currently open, we were able to protect it by pointing to it first and then issuing a p-chord. Now let's get back to our "drill" file and Unprotect it in case we want to write something in it or do something else with the file. Just exit the Files menu with an e. Remember, you never opened your "address" file, just protected it. So now you should be back in "drill". Bring up the Files menu and at the "Enter file command" prompt, write a u. The Braille Lite says, "Unprotected; enter file command." That's fine. Simply exit the Files menu with an e and write something in your "drill" file. You should be able to do that with no hitches now that the file is unprotected again. Another way to protect a file - not so much from glitches, but for privacy in the event someone else has access to your Braille Lite - is to put a password on the file. Enter the Files menu and open the file you want to protect with a password. Then bring up the Files menu again. Write a w. The Braille Lite says, "Enter password". Write a word with special meaning to you that is not likely to be guessed by others and make sure it contains no more than six characters. Or, write a set of letters and numbers that means something to you but that would be gibberish to anyone else. Press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter password again." Re-enter the same password and press another e-chord. From now on, when you want to open this file, you'll get the prompt, "Enter password" each time you press an o-chord from the Files menu to try to get into the file. If you write an incorrect password, the Braille Lite kicks you into the Help file, saying, "Help is open." To take the password away from a file, bring up the Files menu and press an o- chord as if you're going to open it. At the "Enter password" prompt, press a dot 5-chord followed by an e-chord. At the second, "Enter password" prompt, press another dot 5-chord, followed by another e-chord. From now on, the file can be opened again without a password. Next, we'll see how to delete files you no longer need. * 6.7 Deleting Files Let's delete the file called "drill". After all, it's just a junk file we're using for practice. We'll assume that you're currently in the "drill" file as we go through this example. Get into the Files menu and at the "Enter file command" prompt, write a d. The Braille Lite says, ""Enter file to delete". Write the name of the currently open file, "drill", and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Delete drill, are you sure; enter y or n?" Press a y. The Braille Lite confirms, "Okay, Help is open; enter file command." Since you just deleted the file you had open, the Braille Lite put you back into the Help file. But now, let's look at a slightly different scenario where the file you want to delete is not the file that is currently open. Let's get rid of our file, "practice". First, get into your file, "address". It should still be protected from when we worked through that example. Don't worry that you can't write in it for now. Get into the Files menu and at the "Enter file command" prompt, write a d. At the prompt, "Enter file to delete", write "practice" followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Delete practice, are you sure; enter y or n?" Write a y. The Braille Lite says, "Okay, enter file command." Where do you think you'll be when you exit the Files menu with an e? Right. Back in your "address" file. Why? Because the file you just deleted is not the file you had open. So the Braille Lite went out into the binder and found the file you wanted to delete, chucked it and returned you to your currently open file. It's like tossing something in the wastebasket under your desk. Here's another example of file deletion. This time, let's look at what happens when we don't have a file open, but are pointing to a file we want to delete. Open up the Help file with a th-sign-chord. Get into the Files menu and at the prompt "Enter file command", use dot 4-chords till you reach the file "address". You're pointing to it, but it is not open. Press a d-chord. The Braille Lite says, "File is write-protected". Good. Remember, we had protected the "address" file from just this kind of potential disaster. If the "address" file had not been protected though, the Braille Lite would still have a safeguard for you. The prompt would have been, "Delete address, are you sure; enter y or n?" All you'd have to do is write the letter n, and the Braille Lite would simply say, "Enter file command" and you'd still have the Help file open. * Our final example involves deleting a group of files with similar names. If you're accustomed to using MS DOS file naming conventions and wildcards, this section will be old news to you. But check out the command that lets you delete groups of similarly named files. From Section 4.2, you'll remember that we explained how MS DOS uses a two-part name for files: the filename portion can be up to eight characters in length and the extension portion can be up to three characters in length. A period separates the two parts. So a typical filename is something like, "letter.txt" or "address.doc". We also said that you don't have to have all eight characters for the filename portion or all three characters for the extension portion, and in fact, you can have just the filename portion without the period and the extension. For many MS DOS commands, you can use "wildcard" characters when you want to affect a group of files with similar names - for example, if you want to copy a bunch of files all ending with the extension "txt", or if you want to delete a group of files all beginning with the numbers "123". Likewise, the Braille Lite understands these wildcard characters for certain file commands. The first of these commands we've encountered is the command to delete files. The wildcard characters are the asterisk ("*" or dots 1-6 in computer braille) and the question mark ("?" or dots 1-4-5-6 in computer braille). The asterisk replaces a group of characters, the question mark replaces an individual character. For instance, say, you have the files, "letter.txt" and "letter.doc". The wildcard name for these two files is "letter.*" because the part that is the same in both files is the filename "letter" and the part that is different is the extensions "txt" and "doc". Therefore, the wildcard is the extension portion. Likewise, if you have the files, "dates.txt" and "rates.txt", the wildcard name for them is, "?ates.txt" because everything in their respective names is the same except for the wildcard first letter in their filename portions. (For further examples, see Appendix A.) What does all this have to do with deleting files? If you have a group of files in the Braille Lite with similar names that you want to get rid of, from the Files menu write a g. The Braille Lite says, "Enter file to delete". The filename you write should include at least one wildcard. Just remember to write in computer braille the asterisk and/or question mark you include as part of the filename. The Braille Lite finds the files with all the names that match your wildcard description and says something like, "Delete file '*.txt', y or n?" Write a y to accept the deletion or n to cancel it. Clearly, this is a command to be used with caution but it can save you time when you have a large number of files to delete that have some part of their names in common. If you are extra cautious of deleting groups of files all at once, use wildcard characters with the d command instead of the g command from within the Files menu. When you respond to the d command with a wildcard filename pattern, it forces the Braille Lite to ask you whether you want to delete each file it finds with your wildcard character pattern instead of asking you if you want to delete the whole group at once. This may seem tedious with a large group of similarly named files. But it is a safety net just in case there's one file out of that big bunch you really don't want to delete after all. The last thing we'll look at related to manipulating files is changing their size. Let's play with this concept next. 6.8 Changing the Size of a File Throughout this chapter, we've talked a lot about the Braille Lite "page". Let's briefly review this concept. A Braille Lite "page" is really a block of Braille Lite memory consisting of space equal to four thousand and ninety-six characters. If you consider that a standard 11 by 11-1/2 inch piece of braille paper can hold a maximum of one thousand characters, you can see that 4,096 is a lot. It's like having four pieces of braille paper each filled with characters in every single cell. And of course, that's not how braille pages are filled. You have spaces - which by the way, computers, count as characters. You have blank lines for formatting purposes, etc. Blank lines are also counted by a computer as the control characters we mentioned earlier, carriage returns and linefeeds. Since the Braille Lite's memory is not "pieces of paper", but rather a continuous space to be filled with characters, and since the Braille Lite doesn't care whether those characters are text or control characters, the blocks of 4,096 characters worth of memory called "pages" are hefty chunks of memory. Usually, when you create a Braille Lite file, it's a good idea to create it with only one "page". Unless you know that you're going to be filling up the file very rapidly with data, why waste valuable Braille Lite memory by creating a file that has many blank "pages"? But the time will no doubt come when you do need to add a "page" to an existing file. The Braille Lite lets you add space to a file, but only in chunks or "pages" of 4,096 characters worth of space. Let's see how this works. First you might want to check how much room there is left in your file. Unless you've gotten a "File is full" message when you try to write, or a "not enough room" message when you try to copy or insert, you're still okay. Let's work with your "address" file. Press an r-chord from anywhere within your file to see how much room you have left. Chances are, you have plenty. Now open the Help file with the shortcut, th-sign-chord (dots 1-4-5-6-chord). Another way to check how many characters are in a file is through the Files menu. Bring it up with the usual o-chord followed by an f and write a wh- sign-chord (dots 1-5-6-chord). The Braille Lite says something like, "Help 16-677 bytes, enter file command." It displays something like, "0 help 167677 5p". Remember, the number of characters counted includes everything in your file: control characters, spaces, decorative characters, formatting strings, and so on. But it does give you a very accurate reading of the size of the file that you're pointing to from within the Files menu. * Bring up the Files menu again and this time write just a wh-sign. The Braille Lite says, "Enter filename". Write "address" and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite tells you its size even though you haven't pointed to it with dot 1- or dot 4-chords, and even though the "address" file is not currently open. If you answered the "Enter filename" prompt with a wildcard description, such as the ones we described in the previous section, the Braille Lite would tell you the sizes of all the files fitting the wildcard pattern you wrote. In any case, you can use a wh-sign-chord from the Files menu to get the size of the open file, and just a plain wh-sign to get the size of the file you're pointing to even if it's not open, or the sizes of a group of files with similar names. Now leave the Files menu with an e. You should be back in the Help file. Since the last file you had open before you got into the Help file was "address", and since you got into Help with the th-sign-chord, pressing a z- chord should reopen "address". Run through this example a couple of times for practice. We jumped around a lot just to show you how flexible your Braille Lite is about leaping from file to file and giving you information about them quickly and efficiently. Now we're going to make our "address" file bigger. Even though right now it's big enough, let's practice adding a "page" to it. First we have to Unprotect it because otherwise the Braille Lite won't let us do anything to the file. Find the file "address" from your Files menu and open it, if you're not already there. Don't worry that the Braille Lite tells you the file is write-protected. Get into the Files menu and Unprotect the "address" file with a u at the "Enter file command" prompt. The Braille Lite should say, "Unprotected; enter file command." Now just write an e to exit the Files menu and get back into your "address" file. Check out how much room there is left in the file at this point with an r-chord. It should be considerable, over thirty-five hundred characters worth, anyway, unless you have entered lots of names and addresses. Under normal circum stances, we'd say, fine. Leave the file as is and don't add to it. But for practice, let's make the file bigger. Get into the Files menu and at the prompt, write a b. The Braille Lite says, "Enter number of pages to expand." Press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Okay." And where do you suppose you are? Yes. Right where you left off within your "address" file. The Braille Lite simply gave you another "page" worth of memory and put you back where you were in the file. If you want to increase the size of your file by more than one page at once, answer the prompt with a dropped number, indicating how many extra pages you want. But unless you know that you're going to be filling a file with a lot of data quickly - such as a file from your computer - it's probably better to increase pages one at a time so that you don't waste valuable Braille Lite space. How much room do you have in the "address" file now? Press an r-chord. The number should be well over eight thousand. Let's return the "address" file to its original one-page size. This is really too big for our purposes right now. Get back into the Files menu and write an s at the "Enter file command" prompt. The Braille Lite says, "Enter number of pages to subtract". Press an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Okay" and once again leaves you back in your file, just where you had left off. If you want to decrease the size of a file, answering the prompt with the number of pages you want to remove deletes them from the end of the file. Did you get that? When the Braille Lite adds or subtracts "pages" from your file, understand that the block is being added to or subtracted from the end of your file. You can't, for example, be five lines into a file, and decide that you want a blank chunk of space between where you are and the next block of text you already had in this file. Or, that you have a chunk of text you no longer want and therefore you'd like the Braille Lite to subtract that block using the commands just described. How do you add and delete text? We covered that earlier. You use the Insert command or the Delete command within your file for those kinds of activities. The commands described in the present section have to do with big chunks of Braille Lite memory. Can you see how crucial it is to keep track of free space in a file and to know how many characters are actually in that file before removing pages from the end of your file? Just as with previous commands within the Files menu, you can make a file bigger or smaller, adding or subtracting Braille Lite "pages", when those files are not open. As with other Files menu commands, you point to the file first and then issue a b-chord or s-chord (for bigger and smaller respectively) and follow the prompts to make the file being pointed to bigger or smaller. Practice with the commands we've gone over in these last few sections. The only thing left to do in this chapter is to find out how much room we have free in the Braille Lite. 6.9 Free Space in the Braille Lite As you add and delete files and change their sizes, the amount of free space in the Braille Lite varies. From time to time, it's good to check out just how much free space you do have left, especially if you're about to add a biggie. From the Files menu you can simply write an f at the "Enter file command" prompt and the Braille Lite will tell you that you have x-number of "pages" left. For example, it will say something like, "145 pages remaining; enter file command". SUMMARY We've covered a considerable number of ideas in Section II. It's worth reviewing them until you're thoroughly comfortable with them. There are other Files menu commands yet to examine. And, there are other things we can do within files: add a date from the calendar, or a calculation result from the calculator, figure out the number of physical braille or print pages that are in a file, etc. We'll cover these sophisticated concepts in detail in the next two sections. We'll examine a bunch of very handy features the Braille Lite provides for you. Nevertheless, if you've mastered the concepts of the present section, you're well on your way to making the Braille Lite an indispensable tool. SECTION III: WORKING WITH OTHER TOOLS INTRODUCTION Now that you've mastered working with the most important feature of the Braille Lite - reading and writing files - it's time to learn about some handy Braille Lite tools. Think of the Braille Lite as if it were your desktop, complete with all the tools you usually find there: a notepad, a calendar, a calculator, a looseleaf binder, a clock, even a telephone. (Well, the Braille Lite isn't a telephone; but it does let you hook up to one. We'll leave that for Section IV.) For now, we'll learn about the other tools that come already built into the Braille Lite. The chapters of this section cover the clock and the calendar, the stopwatch and the timer, the calculator, and a few other handy features, including the macro and word-exceptions utilities. For the most part, the functions we'll examine are choices from the Options menu, just as the Files menu is. So let's get started. CHAPTER 7: THE CLOCK AND THE CALENDAR We all rely on our watches, clocks, and calendars to keep us on track. So the Braille Lite has both a built-in clock and calendar for your convenience. Not only can the clock tell you what time it is right now and the calendar check how many days away you are from that long-awaited vacation, the clock also tracks the time and date when you last changed a file and the calendar even "tickles" your memory about when important things are happening. Let's look at the clock first. 7.1 The Clock The Braille Lite's clock does what most clocks do. You can check and reset the current time. You even have a choice between American or European time. With American time, hours are announced from one to twelve a.m. or p.m. With European time, hours are announced from zero to 23 and a.m. and p.m. are not spoken. If you have set punctuation announcement to Most Punctuation from the Speech Parameters menu, hours and minutes are announced separated by the word "colon". If you have it set to Some Punctuation, time is announced just as a person might say it. First, let's check out what the Braille Lite thinks is the current time. We'll work with an example. It's anybody's guess how your unit might be set from the factory. Enter the Options menu from anywhere in your currently open file with an o-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Option". Write a t. The Braille Lite says something like, "The time is 1 a.m". You'll still be right where you left off in your file. Now let's see the difference between American and European methods for announcing the time. Press an o-chord and at the "Option" prompt, write the letter s. The Braille Lite says, "Set." Now write an e. The Braille Lite says, "European time set." Check the time with an o-chord t. The Braille Lite should now say something like, "The time is 1." Notice that it did not tell you whether it's a.m. or p.m. That's because we set the Braille Lite to the European method of announcing the time. When you're setting the time in this mode, you are not prompted for a.m. or p.m., of course, since you're on a 0 to 23 hour cycle. Let's return to the American method for announcing the time. Press an o-chord s and at the "Set." prompt, write an a. The Braille Lite says, "American time set". For purposes of our example, we'll use this mode for announcing the time. Let's set the clock to the real time, shall we? We'll use an arbitrary time here, but set your Braille Lite to the real clock so that files you create will have accurate times associated with them. Press an o-chord and at the "Option" prompt, write an s followed immediately by a t, no spaces. You're telling the Braille Lite that you want to set the time. The Braille Lite prompts you with, "Enter time hh mm". Write something like, "1215" (remembering to use dropped numbers). The Braille Lite now says, "Enter a or p for a.m. or p.m." Write p. The Braille Lite confirms, "The time is 12:15 p.m". Great. Now we have the correct time. But how about the date? Let's look at the calendar next. 7.2 The Calendar The Braille Lite's calendar runs like a clock in the sense that it automatically keeps pace with the clock as each new day arrives. It's important that the date be set correctly to maintain accuracy, of course. The calendar has some great features: For example, not only can you check today's date, but you can also check on what day of the week a certain date falls, go backward or forward a number of days to see what the date was or is going to be, insert a particular date in your personal calendar, and nicest of all, set the Braille Lite to remind you when an important date arrives on your personal calendar. 7.2.1 Checking Today's Date To see today's date, simply press an o-chord d. The Braille Lite says something like, "The date is December 25, 1994". It should be set correctly from the factory but, like the clock, this is not always the case. So let's look at how to set the date next. 7.2.2 Setting Today's Date To set the date, press an o-chord to get into the Options menu. Now write the letter s and the Braille Lite responds with, "Set". Write a letter d and the Braille Lite says, "Enter date, mm/dd/yy". Write today's date, using only numbers and no spaces and skipping the century, something like, "010195", and press an e-chord. You immediately hear, "The date is Sunday January 1, 1995". From now on, the Braille Lite will count forward based on the current time and change dates as the clock cycles through each twenty-four hour period. But let's suppose you want to check back on a date or see on what day of the week a future date falls. Since the Braille Lite knows today's date, this is quite simple for it to calculate. 7.2.3 Getting a Date from the Calendar Let's say you want to know on what day a certain date fell because you think you have an extra charge from your hairdresser, who you visit only on Wednesdays. We'll assume our sample date of December 25, 1994 as today's date. Press an o-chord for the Options menu. Now write a letter g to "get a date" from the calendar. The Braille Lite says, "Enter number of days or a date, mmddyyyy". It displays, "Enter mmddyyyy." Depending on what you enter, the Braille Lite responds differently. First, what happens if you just press an e-chord? Try it now. The Braille Lite should say something like, "Day number 360." Oh, it's telling us that today, (Christmas Day in our example) is the 360th day of the year. That's a handy feature to have. But let's continue with our example. Press an o-chord followed by a g again and at the prompt, "Enter number of days or a date mm/dd/yyyy", write "11231994" and press an e-chord. Remember to write all the numbers in ASCII (dropped numbers) and without spaces. The Braille Lite should answer, "The date is Wednesday November 23, 1994." Oh-oh. Guess you did have an appointment that day. Better pay this bill. What about if you know how many days away from today's date a date is and want to enter it into your calendar. Let's see another way to get a date from the calendar. Suppose you just got a call from your boss who wants to set up a meeting for the day before New Year's. Have to go over those end-of-year budget figures one more time. What a Scrooge, calling on Christmas Day for such a thing. Oh well. Better put it in the calendar. Let's see. That makes it six days from today since New Year's Day falls exactly one week from Christmas Day. Press an o-chord g and at the prompt, "Enter number of days or a date mm/dd/yyyy", this time simply enter a dropped number 6 and press an e-chord. The Braille Lite should say, "The date is Saturday December 31, 1994". Incidentally, you can have the Braille Lite count backward a number of days by preceding the number with a dash or minus sign (dots 3-6). Sighing, you decide to enter this meeting into your personal calendar. * 7.2.4 Inserting a Date into Your Calendar The Braille Lite comes with a file called "calendar". Let's get into that file now so that we can insert some dates. Press an o-chord followed by the dropped digits 02. Assuming you haven't deleted it, the calendar file set from the factory is the third file in your Braille Lite. If you can't find it, or if you have deleted it, go ahead and create yourself a file called "calendar". A quick way to insert today's date and/or time into a file is with the ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6-chord). In Chapter 5, we talked at length about this command with regard to pasting text from the Clipboard. You can also use the ing-sign-chord to paste today's date or the present time into a file. Press ing-sign-chord and at the prompt "Paste what?", write a d (for date) or a t (for time). The Braille Lite pastes the information into your file and (if Interactive is on) speaks it to you after saying, "Okay". Moreover, you can insert any date other than today into your currently open file, using the ing-sign-chord followed by a g. At the prompt, "paste what?", write a g. You should hear "Enter a number of days or a date, mmddyyyy". On the display you see, "Enter mmddyyyy". Does this sound familiar? As an example, let's say you want to paste the date January 20, 1995 into your calendar file. At the prompt, write "012095" followed by an e-chord. That date is now pasted in your file. Now, suppose you have pasted various dates into your file and you need to see if a particular date is there. Here's an easy way to find it. Press an f- chord. At the prompt "enter text to find", write a g-chord. You should hear the prompt asking for a number of days or a date. Enter the date you want to find. To find January 20, 1995, for example, write "012095" and then press e- chord to search for the date going forward or th-sign-chord to search going backward in your file. We suggest that you enter three hard carriage returns (dots 4-6-chords) between one date and the next on your calendar. After each date, you'll want a carriage return followed by whatever notes you make to yourself about that date. But after you finish making notes about a date, add three carriage returns. This is a good idea because the Braille Lite replaces the character under the cursor at the point of insertion with a space when it inserts a date. The easiest way for you to avoid confusion is to place three carriage returns between dates. This way, to move from date to date in your calendar is very simple. You can move forward or backward through your calendar by pressing dots 5-6-chords or dots 2-3-chords (the next and previous paragraph commands respectively). Practice the calendar commands before moving on to our next topic - how to get the Braille Lite to remind you of a date on your calendar. 7.2.5 Calendar Alert The Braille Lite can be set to remind you of important dates you've written into your calendar file. You can turn this feature on and off through the Status menu. When Calendar Alert is activated, every time you turn on the Braille Lite, if today's date is marked in your calendar file, the Braille Lite warns you that you have something marked for today and asks if you want to look at it immediately. Let's see how this works. To set up an example, let's enter today's date into our calendar file and make a note to ourselves. Turn your Braille Lite on and open the calendar file. Now press ing-sign-chord g e-chord. When you read the current line, you should see today's date (in our example, Sunday December 25, 1994"). Enter a carriage return followed by a note that says, "Today I am learning about the calendar." Follow this with three carriage returns. Now enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). The Braille Lite says, "Status menu" followed by whatever setting you last checked in the Status menu. Write the letter j. The Braille Lite should tell you the status of calendar alert. So it should say something like, "Calendar check off". We want to activate it. So write a y. The Braille Lite should then say, "Calendar check on." Exit the Status menu with an e-chord and turn the Braille Lite off. Now turn the Braille Lite on again and listen carefully to what it says. You should hear something like, "Braille Lite ready, Calendar alert. Do you want to open the calendar. Enter y or n?" The Braille Lite will not let you do anything else until you have responded to this prompt. We'll write a y because we want to see what's so important about today in the calendar. The Braille Lite says today's date and immediately places us at that point in the calendar. If you check your current line, you'll see that it is right on today's date and the following line says what you wrote as a message about today. Okay, you may go ahead and erase this, if you like. Or, if it's important for you to keep old calendar dates around for a time, you might want to keep it. Just remember that for today at least, every time you turn on the Braille Lite, you'll have to respond to this question about the calendar. The Braille Lite isn't smart enough to know that you've already checked the calendar once today. Besides, you might just want to check it again later in the day to make sure you did everything you had written for today. Now suppose you had answered the prompt with an n. In that case, the Braille Lite would act as it always has in the past, placing you in the file where you last worked and with the cursor where you last had it. To turn the calendar alert feature off again, simply re-enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write a j. At the prompt "Calendar check on", write an n. The Braille Lite now says, "Calendar check off." Press an e-chord to return to your currently open file. When active, the Calendar Alert feature can be somewhat annoying if you have something in your calendar for today and you're constantly turning the Braille Lite on and off. But it's benefits far outweigh this small inconvenience. And you can always turn it off temporarily. We suggest that you activate the Calendar Alert feature, unless you don't plan to use the calendar very much. Even if you do have the Calendar Alert feature turned off, you can still check out whether you have something marked for today in your calendar. Basically, this is a choice from the Options menu and works essentially the same way as we described a moment ago. Press an o-chord a (for alert) from anywhere within a file and you'll hear the familiar Calendar Alert prompt, "Calendar alert, do you want to open the calendar; enter y or n?" Of course, you'll only hear this prompt if something is marked in the calendar file for today. If not, nothing happens and you're right where you were in the file before you issued the o-chord a command. You respond to the prompt just as we've described above. This is a good alternative to having the calendar alert feature active from within the Status menu. As pointed out earlier, you can insert any date you wish into your calendar, not just today. So when that date comes up, the calendar can alert you to check your notes for that date. * 7.3 Information About Your Files Before we leave the clock and the calendar utilities altogether, let's look at a very handy "side effect" of the built-in clock and calendar. You might need to know the date on which you last modified a file. Maybe you want to replace it with new content or delete the file altogether but you're not sure how old the file is. Or maybe you have a backup of a file on a floppy disk and want to compare that file's date or size with that of a file on the Braille Lite to see which is more current. Bring up the Files menu in the usual way by pressing an o-chord f and at the "Enter file command" prompt, first write a t to see what file you currently have open. For sample purposes through out this section, we'll say you have the Help file open. This also means that you're pointing to that file from within the Files menu, unless you press dot 4- or dot 1-chords to point to another file. Now press an i-chord. The Braille Lite should say something like, "Help 5 pages; Date 01/20/95; Time 14:8; 16-677 bytes; enter file command". On the display you only see, "01/20/95 14:8". Not only do you get information about the exact date and time when this file was last changed, but you get the number of Braille Lite pages in the file, how many "bytes" (characters) it contains, and for files which are write-protected, you would get that information, too. If the file were a braille file - that is, a file in Grade 2 braille with braille translation on - you would also hear that information. If you want detailed information about a file which is not currently open or to which you're not currently pointing from within the Files menu, simply write the letter i at the "Enter file command" prompt. The Braille Lite says, "Enter filename". Write the name of the file you want to check and press an e-chord. You immediately hear all relevant information for that file as in our example above, ending with the prompt, "Enter file command". As always when leaving the Files menu, write an e to exit and return to your currently open file. * In addition, you can use this command to get information on a group of similarly named files by using the wildcard characters we discussed in Chapter 6 (the asterisk and question mark). What if you just want the time and date - the stamp - for a file? From the Files menu, write an m-chord (for a file to which you're currently pointing) or just an m (for a file to which you're not currently pointing). Point to the Help file by pressing an l-chord. Then press an m-chord and you hear just the file's name, date, and time stamp. If you write just the letter m, instead of chording it, the Braille Lite says, "Enter filename" and waits for you to tell it which file you want checked. Once you write the file's name, say, the "address" file we created back in Chapter 4, the Braille Lite should tell you the last date and time that file was changed, then leave you back in the Files menu. Exit the Files menu with an e or an e-chord. * Just like the i command from the Files menu that gives you detailed information about your files, the m command from the Files menu also works with the wildcard characters we discussed in Chapter 6 (the asterisk and question mark). Now that we've seen the different ways to get file information, let's check out some other bonuses, the stopwatch and timer. CHAPTER 8: THE STOPWATCH AND THE TIMER The stopwatch and the timer work "hand in hand" on the Braille Lite. Basically, the "Watch" choice on the Options menu lets you use either the stopwatch or the timer. Interestingly, the function of a stopwatch is in effect the opposite of the function of a timer. While a stopwatch times the duration of an event for you, the timer counts down the duration you have set for an event. 8.1 The Stopwatch The Braille Lite's stopwatch does everything you'd expect: it counts down the time you set, it tells you how much time has elapsed since you set it, and so on. To enter the stopwatch mode, press an o-chord to bring up the prompt, "Option", then write a w (for watch). The Braille Lite says, "Stopwatch ready" and the display immediately begins a high-speed clicking sound as it shows "00:00:00:00". This is because the display is in a sort of "ready" mode - as you'll see momentarily. When you're in the stopwatch mode, you can perform only stopwatch tasks. That is, you cannot ask for the date, the time of day, perform calculations, read or write text, etc. In order to perform those functions, you have to exit the stopwatch mode with a z-chord. The Braille Lite confirms, "Exit" and leaves you back in whatever file you were last working. 8.1.1 Starting and Stopping the Stopwatch You can run the stopwatch without setting it to a specified time. Enter the stopwatch mode with an o-chord w and at the "stopwatch ready" prompt, press dot 6. The Braille Lite says, "Running" and the display starts changing rapidly. Notice how fast the numbers change on the display. This is because you're seeing the passage of time in tenths of a second intervals. When precise timing is a must, this can come in handy. But you can pause the display by tapping the left end of the advance bar. Resume displaying the passage of time by tapping the right end of the advance bar. Note that pausing the display does not pause the stopwatch, just the display of the passage of time. For practice, let's leave the display on. Sit back, relax. Count backward from ten slowly, then press dot 6 again. The Braille Lite announces a time interval followed by the word "stopped", something like, "25 seconds 3 tenths stopped". The display shows something like, "00:00:25:30". Next, press dot 6 again. The Braille Lite says, "Running" and the display resumes counting the passage of time. As you press dot 6, start naming the days of the week. When you finish, press dot 6 again. The Braille Lite says a number followed by the word "stopped". Notice that the number is bigger than the number spoken when you timed your count-down. The stopwatch has added the time you took to recite the days of the week to the time you took to run your count-down. An excellent use of the stopwatch is for calling "time-out" during an event. 8.1.2 Reading Elapsed Time by Voice * Turn off the display counter by tapping the left end of the advance bar and let's repeat our count-down from ten backward. Start the stopwatch by pressing dot 6. When the Braille Lite says, "Running", recite your count-down. After speaking each number, press the spacebar. Each time you do, the Braille Lite announces a new time. You are observing the passage of time through the Braille Lite's voice. Each time you press the spacebar, the stopwatch announces the time at the instant the key is pressed. With the stopwatch in the stopped condition, if you press the spacebar, the Braille Lite announces the present time followed by the word "stopped". It might say something like, "7 seconds 8 tenths stopped". Now, suppose you've pressed the spacebar to read the stopwatch but were interrupted by a slamming door. Write a c to hear the most recent time announced again and again. Press c as often as you like. Even with the stopwatch still running, the time you heard last when you pressed the spacebar is announced. Go ahead and press the spacebar again. Notice that some time has elapsed since we started. Probably you'll hear something like, "5 minutes 30 seconds 3 tenths", for example. But how do you stop the watch from running and how do you set it? Let's check that out next. 8.1.3 Stopping and Resetting the Stopwatch We have learned that pressing dot 6 stops and starts the stopwatch without resetting the time to 0. The final stopwatch command we'll look at does both. With the stopwatch running, press dot 3. The Braille Lite says the time elapsed since you started the watch running followed by the words "stopped reset". Suppose you didn't hear the time announced. Writing a c will let you hear it again. What happens if you press the spacebar? In that case, you'll hear the message, "stopped". Pressing c again also makes the Braille Lite repeat "Stopped". By the way, the stopwatch operates even when the Braille Lite is off. If you have the stopwatch running when you turn off the unit, when you turn it back on, the stopwatch will pick up its time right where it left off. The stopwatch has a capacity of 23 hours 59 minutes 59.9 seconds, although Chances are, you won't need it running for a whole day. 8.2 The Timer In a sense, the count-down timer is similar to an alarm clock or kitchen timer. Once you start the count-down timer, you can cancel it but you can't put it on "hold". You need to be in Stopwatch mode to use the timer. Press an o-chord w if you're not in it already. To start the timer, enter a braille number-sign (dots 3-4-5-6). The Braille Lite says, "Enter count-down minutes". Using "dropped numbers", write a 2, then write an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter count-down seconds". Write the number 15, then press an e-chord. The Braille Lite should now say, "Counting" and display the time as it counts. However, you can't pause the braille display as the timer is counting. So just sit back and wait. In one minute and fifteen seconds, the Braille Lite will say, "one minute". If you continue to wait, at the end of two minutes fifteen seconds, the Braille Lite will say, "time is up, stopwatch ready". 8.2.1 Finding out Time Remaining * Let's see how to check the time left on the timer. Enter 2 minutes 15 seconds again. Then enter an e-chord and listen for the Braille Lite to say, "Counting". After a few seconds, press the spacebar. The Braille Lite might say something like, "0 minutes 30 seconds remaining". Pressing the spacebar repeatedly tells you how much time remains to be counted down. Or, just watch the braille display move. 8.2.2 Timing in the Background If you are timing an event, you may have better things to do than pressing the spacebar every so often to see how much time remains. As long as the Braille Lite stays on, you can time an event while you write or read text and perform other activities. To do this, just end your count-down request by writing an e-chord twice. Here's an example. Set your count-down timer to 1 minute 20 seconds. When you have written the 20, write an e-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Counting". Write another e-chord and the Braille Lite says, "Okay". You're back in the file you had open in the exact place you had left off before you brought up the timer. Even if you're just reading, and it's a long file, after the end of the minute and twenty seconds, the Braille Lite will stop reading and say, "time is up" and sound an alarm. But it won't say, "stop watch ready", as it did when you were in Stopwatch mode. You're still in the place in your file where the timer interrupted to let you know time was up. If you want to check out how much time is left, simply press an o-chord followed by the number sign (dots 3-4-5-6). The Braille Lite will tell you and display the time remaining on the timer or say and display, "Stopped", if time is already up. How nice not to have to stand in the kitchen, waiting for the microwave timer to "ding". Set the Braille Lite's timer instead and keep working in your back yard. When dinner is ready, the Braille Lite will let you know. CHAPTER 9: THE CALCULATOR The Braille Lite's calculator is now scientific! This powerful, built-in calculator does much more than a standard one: Not only can it add, subtract, multiply, divide, calculate percentages and extract square roots. It can perform algebraic expressions, trigonometric functions, etc. You can even store calculation results in its 26 memory locations to make it easier to work with complicated computations. 9.1 Basic Operations The calculator uses Nemeth braille symbols for all of its functions. Here are most of the braille symbols you need to know: addition + (dots 3-4-6) subtraction - (dots 3-6) multiplication * (dots 1-6) division / (dots 3-4) percent % (dots 1-4-6) square root (dots 3-4-5-chord) decimal point . (dots 4-6) left parenthesis ( (dots 1-2-3-5-6) right parenthesis ) (dots 2-3-4-5-6) comma , (dot 6) To enter the calculator mode, you make a choice from the Options menu as usual. This time you press an o-chord c. The Braille Lite says, "Option, Calculator ready". When you're finished with the calculator, you can return to the file in which you were working by simply pressing a z-chord, and the Braille Lite confirms, "Exit". Now let's run through some examples. We'll assume you're in calculator mode. To perform any computation with the calculator, you write an expression, including all appropriate operations symbols (like a plus sign, for example) and end the expression with an e-chord. Never include spaces in a computation, as you might do when writing one out on a piece of paper and use only "dropped" numbers to calculate. Write 2+2 followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite responds, "4" or "four period". The response varies with how your speech parameters for punctuation announcement are set. To do another calculation, you don't have to clear the calculator. The Braille Lite assumes that you're starting a new computation when you enter a number after pressing an e-chord for a result. Write 375-157 followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite responds, "218". If you want to be absolutely sure that the calculator is cleared for another computation, simply press a 0-chord (dots 3-5-6-chord), and the Braille Lite confirms, "Clear". Now go ahead and try a few sample calculations on your own, using some other operations, like multiplication. Try decimals, try big numbers. A couple of notes: When working with negative numbers, you must clear the calculator between one computation and the next. (Negative numbers are often used in algebraic expressions. If you're not familiar with their use, don't worry about it.) Otherwise, the effect of your calculations is cumulative. Also, when you enter the sign of operation for addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, the Braille Lite announces the word "plus, minus, times, or divided by" before you enter another number. 9.2 Setting Precision So far, our sample calculations have come out even. There have been no remainders. But if you divide 100 by 14, the Braille Lite's response varies according to the number of decimal places to which your calculator is set. This is referred to as the "precision" of the calculator. Usually, two decimal places is enough since that's all you need for currency. But occasionally, you'll want a more precise response. Here's how to change the decimal precision on the calculator. From within calculator mode, press a p-chord. At the Braille Lite prompt, "Enter precision", write 3 followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite now says, "Okay" to confirm your new setting. Now the calculator is set to three decimal places. Let's check it. Write 100/14 followed by an e-chord. You should hear, "7.142". You can set the calculator to a maximum precision of twelve decimal places. However, be aware that the calculator drops 0's at the end of a result. For example, if you divide 300000 by 1190 and you have precision set to 2, you get 252.1 as a result. If you set the precision to 3, you still get 252.1. When you increase precision to 4, you discover that your result is 252.1008. The second and third decimal places were 0 and were not spoken when precision was set to just three decimal places. 9.3 Inserting Calculation Results into a File Work in your file as you normally do, writing text, cutting and pasting, inserting and deleting. When you're ready to insert the result of a calculation into your text, simply enter Calculator mode and perform your calculation. Then exit the calculator with a z-chord. Finally, press an i-chord followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite remembers that you just computed something and immediately inserts it into your open file. You're left just where you were before you performed your calculation. Note that the Braille Lite uses the braille decimal point (dots 4-6) even when displaying an integer. So if you insert a result of 25 into your file, the period will look like the Nemeth braille decimal point (dots 4-6) and not like the literary braille period (dots 2-5-6). You may have to edit your file accordingly. * Furthermore, if you have calculations written in a file for which you need the results, you don't have to write them over again from within Calculator mode. Get onto a new line in your currently open file with a hard cariage return. Then write a calculation that you want in your file and which you want the calculator to compute. (Make sure you write the expression using only computer braille notation. And, by the way, here you can use spaces.) Now press an o-chord followed by a k to hear the result of the computation. While the answer is not automatically inserted into your file at the end of your written expression, you can certainly add it to the end of the expression by writing an equals sign and then pressing i-chord e-chord to paste the calculator's answer into your file. Caution: As we mentioned a minute ago, everything has to be in computer braille here, and your result is, too. You may want to put "do not translate" formatting strings around the calculation and its result in your file so that when you print the file, the calculation will print properly. See Section 15.2.1 for details on how to turn the braille translator off for a portion of a file. 9.4 Performing Percentage Calculations Many people find dealing with percents baffling, to say the least. Nevertheless, we provide a couple of examples here for your convenience. Besides, we all use percentages far more than we realize in daily transactions. Enter Calculator mode with an o-chord c, if you're not already in it. To determine what percent one number is of another number, first write the value of the percentage, then write the percent sign, and finally, the number whose percentage you want to calculate. As usual, finish the computation with an e-chord. For example, to find 50 percent of 26, write 50 % 26 e-chord (remembering not to put spaces in between each part of the expression). The Braille Lite responds, "13". Make sense? Fifty percent of something is half of it; so clearly, thirteen is half of twenty-six. By the way, those of you adventurous enough to try algebraic calculations, trigonometric functions, natural logarithms and the like, get set. We're about to dive headfirst into those deep waters. But first, let's see how to store items into the 26 memory locations in your calculator. 9.5 Storing and Using the Memory Locations The Braille Lite calculator has 26 memory locations where you can store results of computations. These memory locations are labeled A through Z. One special memory location, R, always stores your last result. All the others store and save results, even after you exit the Calculator mode and turn off the Braille Lite. There are two ways to store a number in a memory location: First, write an arithmetic expression and press an e-chord to compute its result. Then press an s-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Store". Write the letter of the memory location where you want to store it, for example, A. The Braille Lite confirms, "Okay". Second, start with a cleared calculator memory and simply write a number followed by an e-chord. Then press an s-chord followed by the letter of the memory location where you want it stored. To read the contents of a memory location, simply write the letter of that location followed by an e-chord. If you have stored a number in a memory location, you can use that number within a calculation. Write the letter of the memory location where you stored the number as part of the expression to be calculated. For example, write 3-2 followed by an e-chord. At the response, "1", press an s-chord A to store the result in memory location A. Write 3-1 followed by an e-chord. At the response, "2", press an s-chord B to store this result in memory location B. So now you have numbers stored in memory locations A and B. Write a+b followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite looks up the number stored in each memory location and calculates, "3". You were able to add the numbers using only the letter labels of the memory locations. As we said above, R is a special memory location. The most recent result you got from pressing an e-chord is always stored in R. You can use the number stored in r just as you use the other memory locations labeled A through Z. With a bit of practice, you can use the memory locations to store long numbers, or important ones (like the amount of your paycheck), so you can track how it's dwindling as you go through the week. 9.6 Extracting a Square Root No, not nearly as painful as a root canal! To extract the square root of a number, write the number whose square root you want, then press an ar-sign-chord (dots 3-4-5-chord). No e-chord is required. For example, to extract the square root of 25, simply write "25" followed by an ar-sign-chord. The Braille Lite immediately says, "5". * 9.7 Complex Functions The Braille Lite has many built-in functions for performing algebraic, trigonometric, even statistical functions. Basically, the functions have names like "sin" for the sine function, and arguments that you provide within parentheses separated by commas. For your convenience, we'll go through a few examples of how to enter functions correctly into the calculator. For a complete listing, refer to the Help file or to Appendix B, the Quick Reference guide. In this whole discussion, we'll assume you're familiar with the terms "function", "argument", etc. Let's first take something simple. How about if we find the average of three numbers. From within Calculator mode, write avg(3,5,7) and press an e-chord. Remember to write in dropped number notation and to write the parentheses in computer braille. The Braille Lite should respond, "5". Easy enough. Let's try something a little more daring. Calculate the sine of 90 degrees or pi/2 radians. Write sin(90) and press an e-chord. You should hear the correct answer, "1". Since the calculator's default is in degrees, you're okay. But let's switch to radians. Simply press an r-chord. The Braille Lite says, "radians". Now write sin(pi/2) and press an e-chord. Not surprisingly, you also get a response of "1" since the calculator computed pi/2 and then its sine in radians. To get back to degrees, press a d-chord. Now, for those of you who are real risk takers, how about calculating the value of e. First let's reset precision to something like 5 to get a better computation. Press a p-chord and at the prompt, "Set precision", write a 5 followed by an e-chord. Now write exp(1) followed by an e-chord. You should hear, "2.71828". Sound right? Yes, e is somewhere around that. How about a statistical function? Calculate the median of a group of numbers. Write median(5-6,7,8) followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite answers, "6.5". Of course, there's no reason why you can't add like functions together, as in sin(90) + sin (45), etc. But we'll stop here. By now, you should have the general idea, or be totally at sea. If you find you're having problems calculating some of these complex functions (like certain trigonometric functions), call us for help. 9.8 Error Messages and Tips If you set the calculator an impossible task, such as dividing 17 by 0, the Braille Lite rejects the expression with, "Error, division by 0". If you use an incorrect chord for an e-chord, the Braille Lite says, "not valid calculator command". You can use the backspace (b-chord) to make corrections. For example, if you want to add .5 and .5 but write .4 as your second entry, press a b-chord to erase the 4 and then write the 5 followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite responds to your corrected entry with, "1". If you haven't pressed an e-chord yet, you can hear the calcula tion you have written thus far by pressing a c-chord. Once you press the e-chord however, pressing c-chord does nothing. Finally, pressing an f-chord toggles the voice between speaking numbers as digits or full words from within Calculator mode. As you can see, the scientific calculator is quite a bonus. Now let's turn to some other useful tools in the Braille Lite. CHAPTER 10: OTHER HELPFUL FEATURES 10.1 Word Exceptions The Braille Lite is obviously a very handy device for so many tasks. But oh, how frustrating that it can't pronounce certain things just right! Well, that's the price you pay for mechanical speech, isn't it?. Not really. You can get the Braille Lite to pronounce things just the way you want. The word exceptions dictionary takes care of funny-sounding words, proper names and abbreviations. You can create a special file containing unusual words or letter combinations (acronyms) that the Braille Lite may not recognize. Take, for example, the letters "USA" - a very common abbreviation, isn't it? Yet, the Braille Lite can't be expected to take everything into account. Get into an existing file or create a new one for practicing with this concept. For our example, we'll use our "practice" file from Chapter 4. Get into it now. Let's start with a clean slate. We'll assume your "practice" file is empty. If it isn't, delete whatever practice junk you have in it at this time. Write "USA" and notice that the Braille Lite says, "use-ah", as if it were a word. We'll create a file called "word.fix" to keep track of such anomalies so that when we write the abbreviation, the Braille Lite will pronounce it correctly. Make sure to write the filename with a computer braille period (dots 4-6) and not the braille period (dots 2-5-6). Bring up the Files menu and create a file called "word.fix" having one Braille Lite page and having braille translation "off". Within this new file, write in ASCII only, not in Grade 2 braille, the letters "USA" just as before, except this time follow the letters immediately by an ASCII equals sign (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6) and then write each letter, separated by spaces. So your text should look like this (we spell this out precisely in braille terms for clarity): "usa dots 1-2-3-4-5-6 u space s space a" Now press a carriage return (dots 4-6-chord). You have just created your first "word exception". Return to your "practice" file where you had the text that caused this havoc in the first place. Does the Braille Lite now say "U.S.A." or does it still say "use-ah"? It may or it may not. That depends on whether the Braille Lite is awake and looking out for word exceptions. Check the Status menu to see whether Word Exceptions is "on". Bring it up in the usual way with an st-sign-chord and jump to the setting by writing an e (for Exceptions). The Braille Lite should say something like, "Exceptions check on". To turn it off, simply press an n; to turn it on, press a y. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. What's important about the word exceptions dictionary is that you must be using computer braille when you write in it. You write the word, phrase, or acronym followed immediately by an ASCII equal sign and then the correction. The word exceptions checker is especially nice for proper names and for all those alphabet soup acronyms floating around nowadays. 10.2 The One-Handed Braille Lite Some people need to use the Braille Lite with one hand, rather than two. For those special cases, the Braille Lite can be turned into a "one-handed" device. To turn the Braille Lite into a device that accepts keystrokes for one-handed use only, simply press a dot 6 as you turn on the unit. The Braille Lite says, "One-hand mode on, Braille Lite ready, (filename) now open". From now on, the Braille Lite works like this: The spacebar is your focal point. To write a character that involves only dots to either side of the spacebar, simply write the character, for example, an l (dots 1-2-3) followed by the spacebar. The space is not entered into your file, just the l. To write a character that involves dots on both sides of the spacebar, say a g, then write the left half first (dots 1-2) and then the right half (dots 4-5) followed by a spacebar to enter the character into your file. You could have written the right half first, then the left half, or you could have pressed each key individually. The important thing to remember is that the character is entered only after you press the spacebar. To enter chords is a little more complicated. You enter a chord in one-handed mode by starting with a space. Then you press the appropriate dots on either side of the spacebar and end with another space. For example, to get to the end of the file, normally a dots 4-5-6-chord), you press the spacebar, then write dots 4-5-6, then press the spacebar again. The Braille Lite will then say, "End of file". We suggest you only use this mode if you truly require it. For most users, one-hand mode is unnecessary and potentially confusing if you accidentally get into it. To return the Braille Lite to two-handed mode, simply press a dot 3 when next turning on the unit. 10.3 Review Only Mode If you want to review the contents of a file but don't want to bother with chords to read paragraph after paragraph, you can place yourself temporarily in Review mode. Press an o-chord and at the "Option" prompt, write an r. The Braille Lite says, "Review on, okay". Until you issue another chord command, any chord will do, you can write dot combinations you normally execute with the spacebar. For example, dot 4 reads you the next line. dots 1-4 or the letter c, reads you the current line, and so on. Exit Review mode by simply pressing any chord. The Braille Lite says, "Off". Or, turn the unit off altogether to return it to normal use. The next chapter examines macros, and no, we don't mean fish. CHAPTER 11: MACROS If you're already familiar with the concept of macros, you may skip this introductory section and move directly to the specifics on how to create and play macros. 11.1 What's a Macro, Anyway Have you noticed that there are some key sequences we perform all the time? For example, we're always telling you to "get to the Files menu", which usually means pressing an o-chord f. Big deal. That's only two keystrokes. But what if you check your calendar several times a day, for example, or if you jump in and out of a certain file all the time to look up a phone number? The numerous keystrokes involved may be a nuisance to repeat and maybe you just don't have the time. Granted, the Braille Lite shuts up as soon as you press a key during the processing of a command. You don't necessarily have to listen to it speak an entire prompt before you respond to it - a time-saver. But it's even more practical to use a two-keystroke command instead of a multi-keystroke command. For example, suppose you're constantly looking up phone numbers in your "address" file. Ordinarily, you'd do the following, as you'll remember from Chapter 4: Press o-chord. At the "Option" prompt, write an f. At the "Enter file command" prompt, write an o. At the "Enter file to open" prompt, spell out the name of the file followed by an e-chord. At the "filename now open" prompt, press an l-chord to get to the top of the file. At the "Top of file" prompt, press an f-chord. At the "Enter text to find" prompt, write the name of the person whose number you want to find. Then press an e-chord. Assuming the name is found, the Braille Lite says the name. Then press a dot 4-chord to hear the phone number following the name. Then press an o-chord followed by an f followed by an o followed by the name of the file you were in before, followed by an e-chord to get back there. Fatiguing, isn't it - especially on a regular basis. A macro can make the whole business much simpler. Yes, you could eliminate some steps if you know that the address file is file number 5 and you press an o-chord followed by a dropped "05" to get there, etc. But overall, you're still talking about a lot of keystrokes to get one piece of information. A macro can reduce significantly how many keystrokes it takes to do a task you perform repeatedly. Now let's see how it all works. 11.2 Recording a Macro When you create a macro for the first time in the Braille Lite, it automatically creates a file called "macros.sys" and places it at the end of your files list. The "macros.sys" file stores the macros you create so that when you want to play them, the Braille Lite can find them. You can create up to 64 macros and each can contain up to 63 keystrokes. While recording a macro, about six keystrokes before the 63-character limit is reached, you are alerted with a beep. You can name a macro with a letter of the alphabet, or with any braille symbol, like the-sign (dots 2-3-4-6). But we suggest sticking to meaningful alphabet name designations. For example, a macro for your calendar should probably be named by the letter c. A word of caution: When you are creating (or recording) a macro, that is literally what you are doing. You are performing the sequence of keystrokes that you want to automate and "recording" that sequence at the same time. So we strongly recommend that you record a macro very slowly and carefully to avoid writing erroneous keystrokes. This is especially important if part of the macro is supposed to edit text or manipulate files. Imagine your surprise if you accidentally delete the wrong file as you're recording your macro. It could be a costly mistake. Oh, it won't matter by the time you go to play the macro. You'll already have deleted the file. So remember that recording a macro is like recording on your tape recorder with a live microphone. Just as unwanted conversation or extraneous noises can creep into a recording, unwanted keystrokes can creep into a macro if you're not careful. We'll start with a very simple example of recording a macro. Let's get into the file called "practice" and go to the end of the file. We'll create a macro that simply adds one day to today's date and inserts that date into our file. You might use this at the end of each day to "move" your calendar forward a day. Start by checking today's date. For sample purposes, we'll say that today is Sunday, January 1, 1995. To begin recording the macro, we suggest that you first run through all the steps of the macro to make sure each step does exactly what you want. Remember that when you're recording the macro, you are in fact performing the steps you're recording. So, it's best to plan carefully. The steps in the present example are: ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6-chord) g, followed by a "dropped" 1, e-chord. Those steps do the following: ing-sign- chord prepares you for pasting something; g gets you into calendar mode. Writing the "1" moves the calendar forward a day from today's date. Pressing an e-chord inserts the date spoken by the Braille Lite into your file. Now let's perform the actual recording. Make sure that you're at the end of your file and that the last three characters are hard carriage returns. To start recording a macro, press an n-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Macro, enter a character." We'll enter a letter c (for calendar). The Braille Lite says, "Recording" Go ahead and perform the steps we described above and don't worry about the Braille Lite prompts. If you make a mistake during the process, simply abort the recording with a z-chord. Press another n-chord to complete the recording of this macro. The Braille Lite should say, "Macro end." Notice that the last line of your file is indeed tomorrow's date. So, as we warned, the Braille Lite not only recorded your macro, it also executed the steps it recorded. Now let's look at how to play this macro. We'll pretend that it's now tomorrow and that we want to add the following day to our calendar. 11.3 Playing an Existing Macro You play a macro with two simple keystrokes - a j-chord and the letter (or other braille symbol) by which you named your macro. If you want to incorporate an existing macro into one you're recording, don't press another n-chord to complete the recording process. Instead, press a j-chord at the point you want the old macro to "take over". Then write the character that represents the name of the old macro. This is sometimes called "nesting" macros. Let's see how to play the macro we just recorded. Get to the end of your "practice" file and write in three hard carriage returns. Play the macro for calendar update by pressing a j-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Macro". It's waiting for the character designation (or key definition). Now write the letter c. Whether the Braille Lite actually voices each step in the processing of the macro depends on whether it's set to speak macros. For now, we'll assume it is speaking the steps as it performs them. Notice that the Braille Lite finishes the whole process far faster than you could have. You should be at the point in your file that says tomorrow's date. What? Shouldn't it say the day after tomorrow? Well remember, we were pretending that tomorrow is already here and that we were adding another day to our calendar. The Braille Lite doesn't know about our game and so it simply added one day to today's date and inserted that date into your file. Since the Braille Lite keeps time, try this macro again tomorrow and you'll see that it works as we suggest. Incidentally, we told you to add those extra hard carriage returns in between running each sample macro because the Braille Lite inserts a date by replacing the last character in your file with a space. If you had not placed those hard carriage returns at the end of your file, you might have ended up with the date being part of the last line of text that was already in your file. 11.4 How to Check a Macro Whether the Braille Lite voices the steps of a macro as it plays is up to you. From anywhere within a file, you can "Kill" macro speech with a k-chord or "verbalize" macro speech with a v-chord. You can even include k-chord and v-chord commands in your macro as you record it. Once you become accustomed to using macros, you'll probably want speech off as you run them. Certainly, a macro runs much faster if the Braille Lite doesn't have to voice prompts as it's performing the task. But until you're very comfortable with macros, we suggest that you press a v-chord to have the macro voice what it's doing. This is also helpful if you forget what a macro is supposed to be doing. Next, we'll talk about pausing a macro as it's playing so you can respond to a prompt or enter text and then let the macro continue. This is where the full power of macros becomes self-evident. 11.5 Pausing a Macro In our introduction to macros, we suggested an example of a macro to search for a phone number from your "address" file. The macro has to pause long enough for you to enter the name of the person whose phone number you want, and then it has to go and find it for you. To make a macro pause while it's playing, you include a special command as you record the macro at the point where you want it to pause. To make the macro wait for you to enter a single character, press a ch-sign-chord (dots 1-6- chord). The Braille Lite says, "Pause". To make the macro wait for you to enter a full line of text, press ch-sign-chord twice. The Braille Lite says, "Line pause". Then instruct the macro to continue processing by pressing an e-chord, at which point the Braille Lite confirms your instruction with, "Pause end". Let's go through an example. Suppose you have to keep a log of all messages that come into the office - for over forty people. Each person has a voice mailbox where callers can leave messages. With that many names, you can't memorize all the extensions; so, you have them in a file called "staff". First, set up the files on your Braille Lite. Create a file called "staff" and write some names and phone number extensions in it as follows: name, hard return, phone number, two hard returns, next name, hard return, phone number, two hard returns, etc. (The purpose of placing two hard returns (as we've pointed out often) is to separate each entry by paragraphs to make it easier to read through such a file. Now create yourself a "messages" file where you place the time and date when messages come in for the staff. Our macro does the following, assuming we're starting from within the "messages" file. (We separate each command with spaces and commas only for readability.): hard return (dots 4-6-chord) - Separate current entry from previous one. o-chord, f, o, staff, e-chord - Open "staff" file. l-chord - Go to top of file. f-chord - Find text command. ch-sign-chord twice - Pause macro for you to enter desired name. e-chord twice - First to end the pause, second to go and find the name. m-chord - Mark the beginning of the entry. dot 4-chord - Read phone extension so you can transfer caller to it. dot 4-chord - Place cursor at end of entry. gh-sign-chord (dots 1-2-6-chord) - Copy entry to Clipboard. o-chord, f, o, messages, e-chord - Return to "messages" file. space - Append space at end of file. ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6-chord), c - Copy entry from Clipboard. ing-sign-chord, d, ing-sign-chord, t - Copy date and time for current entry. That's the end of the macro. Since this macro has prompts we need to hear, press a v-chord to verbalize macro speech before starting the recording process. Go ahead and record this macro just as we list it above, starting and ending with an n-chord and naming it with the letter l (for log). As you record it, answer the prompt, "Enter text to find" with nothing. After pressing the final n-chord that completes the recording of your macro, read what's in your file. You should hear nothing except today's date and the current time because you didn't ask the macro to find a name while you were recording it. But, as we've mentioned several times in this discussion on macros, it does execute as it records. That's why today's date and time are in your "messages" file. Go ahead and erase them, if you like. Or, just leave them in for a minute until we run this macro to see what happens next. * By the way, caution is advised if you include commands in a macro that take you to the end of your file - such as a dots 4-5-6-chord command. Macros stop processing when they reach the end of a file. You won't notice anything special going on as you record a macro with a dots 4-5-6-chord in it. But when you try to play such a macro, it will process your commands only up to the point where it encounters the dots 4-5-6-chord. At that point, it will stop, and you may think something is wrong with the macro because you won't hear an error message of any kind. This situation may also arise if you include a Find command or Search-and- Replace sequence within a macro. Such a macro will run well as long as text is found. However, if the text you're looking for is not found (which means that the whole file was searched and the end of the file was reached without finding your text), the macro stops processing immediately upon reaching the end of the file. We're not suggesting that you never use the Find or Search- and-Replace commands in a macro. Only, be aware that macros always stop processing when the end of a file is reached. Let's play the macro in our example above with a j-chord l and see what happens. You should hear, "Top of file, enter text to find, line pause." Write a name that's in your "staff" file - say, "John" - and press an e-chord to let the macro continue. You'll hear, "Pause end". Then you should hear something like, "extension 25, marked, copied, Option, Enter File Command, Filename, "staff" is open, Paste what, Tuesday July 4, 1995, Paste what, 12:15 PM". All of the Braille Lite prompts speak as the macro is running. Kill speech during macro execution with a k-chord and run the macro again, looking for a different name, if you like. Now, the only thing you should hear is, "Enter text to find". Write "Jane" and press an e-chord. The macro will run through the same steps as before but won't chatter as it's doing so. The only things you should hear are the extension for Jane, and the date and time. Certainly, this is much simpler than having to run through all those steps manually each time a call comes in, and at the end of the day, you can print out today's log for your boss. Just think how efficient you'll look. What happens if the name you are searching for is not found? The macro simply aborts at that point. 11.6 Write-Protecting Macros Since we've created such a masterpiece, let's make sure we protect it. What if you forgot, for instance, that you already have a macro labeled with the letter l. You could accidentally start recording a new macro, erasing the one you so painstakingly created before. To avoid this pitfall, you should consider protecting your macros. Press an n-chord as if you were going to record a macro. At the prompt, "Macro, enter a character", press a p-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Write-protected". Now if you try to write over an existing macro, the Braille Lite stops you with, "Write-protected". In fact, you won't be able to create any new macros while in this mode. It's similar to write-protecting your important files. When you try to write anything into a write-protected file, the Braille Lite says a similar message, "File is write-protected". By the way, the "macros.sys" file is always protected. You couldn't write in it even if you wanted to do so. To be able to create new macros or replace old ones, you can Unprotect them with an n-chord u-chord. The Braille Lite will simply say, "Unprotected" and you'll be able to create macros once again. * 11.7 Adding your Own Messages to a Macro One thing we might have included in the macro we just wrote is a message that says, "The extension is". That way, you hear a complete sentence when you hear the extension. As you record the macro, at the point where you want such a message to speak, press a dots 2-3-6-chord. Write the text of your message in computer braille and end it with an e-chord. Then proceed with the rest of the steps you want the macro to perform. When you play this macro, your message will be spoken at the appropriate point in the process. A very effective use of writing your own messages into a macro is when you want the macro to prompt you to do something. It's true that the macro says the normal Braille Lite prompts like "Enter text to find". But in the macro that runs your name and phone number search, you could have it say something like, "Enter a person's name from your 'staff' file" to remind you exactly what it is you're supposed to find. To make sure the macro speaks a message you wrote in it, activate macro speech with a v-chord. Then run the macro and you'll hear your message at the appropriate point in its processing. Otherwise, your message won't speak. Clearly, macros greatly enhance the flexibility of the Braille Lite. Now we move on to another very useful feature, the Spellchecker. CHAPTER 12: THE SPELLCHECKER The spellchecker program (or application, in computerese) is already loaded into your Braille Lite from the factory. It's in a file called "spell.dic", which takes up 86 Braille Lite pages. If you deleted this large file to make room for others, refer to Sections 14.4 and 15.5 to see how to load external programs into the Braille Lite. The spellchecker assumes you can afford a lot of space on your machine for a "dictionary". On the other hand, the advantage of having a dictionary always at your fingertips may be worth it - well, not exactly a dictionary. The spellchecker inspects your files for spelling errors and suggests corrections for the misspelled words it finds. It also allows you to create a secondary, personal "dictionary" with words that are spelled correctly but that aren't part of the "spell.dic" file. 12.1 Running the Spellchecker To load the spellchecker into memory, from your currently open file, bring up the Options menu and write a ch-sign (dots 1-6). The Braille Lite says, "Spellcheck what?" Write a w to check the word currently under your cursor or write a z to check your entire document, starting from your current cursor location. If you want to spellcheck the entire document from beginning to end, make sure your cursor is at the top of the file. If you decide to discontinue spellchecking the document, you can abort the process with the usual z-chord. In that case, the document is checked only to the point where you cancelled the process. When a word is not found, you've either spelled it incorrectly - it doesn't match a word in the spellchecker - or it may not be a word found in a standard dictionary, like a proper name. In such a case, the spellchecker has options for you. If the Braille Lite says, "Not found" and spells out the word in question, it then presents you with a set of options. Let's look at these one at a time. If you get stuck and can't remember the available options, write an h to hear them repeated. 12.2 Adding a Word to your Personal Dictionary Choose Option a for adding a word to a "custom" dictionary called "personal.dic" - a file the spellchecker automatically creates for you and places at the end of your files list. The Braille Lite says, "Okay" and keeps searching the file for other misspellings. 12.3 Bypassing a Word for the Rest of the Document Suppose you have "XYZ" in a file. This is the way you want to spell this "word". You don't want to add it to a personalized dictionary and you don't want to have the spellchecker continue to warn you every time it finds it. Choose Option b from the spellchecker menu and the word is bypassed for the remainder of the spellcheck process. 12.4 Reading a Word in Context What if you're not sure whether a word is correct but you would be if you could hear surrounding text. This might be true of an abbreviation or acronym. Choose Option c to hear the word spoken as part of the current line of text in your file. 12.5 Correcting a Word If you realize that the word is spelled wrong, choose Option e. The Braille Lite prompts you to, "Enter correct word". When you've written it, press an e-chord and the Braille Lite says, "Okay", confirming that it has replaced the word for you in the file. Then it continues to spellcheck the document. 12.6 Repeating a Word Let's say you're not sure what spelling the Braille Lite gave you for the word in question. Choose Option r to have the word spoken and spelled again. Press dots 3-6-chord to have the word spelled out phonetically. 12.7 Overlooking a Word If the word the spellchecker thinks is wrong is really okay, but you want it to be checked throughout the rest of the document, choose Option o. 12.8 Suggested Replacement Words If you think you might have chosen a better word or you want to hear possible spellings for the word, the spellchecker provides you with its best guesses of what it thinks you meant to spell. Choose Option s. The spellchecker lists several possibilities: Move back a choice with dot 1-chord and forward a choice with dot 4-chord, to the top of the suggestion list with l-chord and to the end of it with a dots 4-5-6-chord. Writing a c reads you the current choice, and pressing an e-chord replaces the incorrect word with the current choice. To leave this submenu without choosing a replacement word, simply abort it with a z-chord. A note of caution: While the spellchecker can check through a Grade 2 braille file, when it replaces a word in such a file, it does so in computer braille. In other words, if the replacement word is, say, "word", you will find that it is spelled out, not contracted, in your braille file. While this does not affect the reading of the text, it may affect your ability to search for that word later. You could look for the contracted version of the word for a long time and never find it. The spellchecker does take up a considerable amount of Braille Lite space, but if you write a great deal with the Braille Lite or have no other word processor at your disposal for printing perfectly spelled documents, it can be a lifesaver! And speaking of printers and other computers, we turn to them next. SUMMARY This section has covered a staggering array of utilities and tools available in the Braille Lite. We suggest you review those chapters that are especially important to your daily use of the Braille Lite before moving on to our next challenge, telecommunications. This subject can scare some. Don't worry. We'll keep it as simple as possible. You'll find that hooking up the Braille Lite to other devices can only broaden your horizons. Take a deep breath - and let's move on. SECTION IV: CONVERSING WITH OTHER DEVICES INTRODUCTION Up to now, we've looked at the Braille Lite as a "stand-alone" device. In computerese, such a device can perform tasks on its own, without being hooked up to any other devices. And we've seen how powerful the Braille Lite is all by itself. We now begin to explore how much more you can do when you hook up the Braille Lite to other devices: printers, computers, disk drives, and modems. No doubt, you've heard that things get real technical when words like "cable", "serial versus parallel", and even that big word, "telecommunications", come on the scene. Consequently, many shy away from exploring what telecommunications can mean to them. It is indeed very easy to slide into jargon when discussing the subject. The good news is, you don't have to be a techie-whiz to hook up your Braille Lite to another device. As with previous sections of this manual, we assume that you may not be familiar with telecommunications and that an introduction will help demystify the subject for you. If you're already acquainted with the jargon, we suggest skimming over the first section anyway, and then looking over the rest of the chapter carefully, because we discuss customizing telecommunications settings in the Braille Lite. Then you can skip directly to those chapters of special interest to you. CHAPTER 13: INTRODUCING TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND SETTINGS What happens when you're using your telephone or watching your television? Why, information is being sent and received, of course: voice through the phone and pictures through the TV. Telecommunications is simply the ability to send and receive information to and from one place to another, from one device to another. It is accomplished through cables linking the devices and by matching up various settings on the devices being linked 13.1 Cables The Braille Lite comes with a cable that you can connect to many printers, computers, even modems. At times, you can make the connection without additional adapters or connectors. But more often, you need to connect cable adapters or additional cables between the Braille Lite cable and the other device. Let's clear up some of the mystery around cables right off. You don't have to understand the technical details surrounding cabling issues, just be aware of what kind of connectors you may need. There are four things to consider when linking the Braille Lite to another device: serial versus parallel, gender, number of pins, and null modem cable requirements. Don't be scared off by these terms. We promise not to get too techie. * 13.1.1 Serial versus Parallel The Braille Lite can be either a serial or a parallel device. You must determine whether the device to which you want to link the Braille Lite is serial or parallel. (The manual that came with the device should tell you and the dealer can give you this information even before you purchase the device.) Most printers today are parallel devices or have both parallel and serial options. Since the Braille Lite has both ports, we'll discuss them both. But due to the myriad settings you can change on serial devices, we'll spend much more time on the serial connection. 13.1.2 Gender Another thing to determine about cables is the sex of the connector and the sex of the port to which you're linking it. Examine each end of the Braille Lite cable. You have a connector that is small and square at one end and a connector that is larger and flatter on the other end. Notice that the small, square connector, which is the one that plugs into the Braille Lite, has a single dot at the top and two dots on the bottom so you know how to plug in the cable. Also, notice the tiny holes in the connector. This is a female connector. Examine the port for this cable. It is on the left side of the Braille Lite as it faces you, furthest away from you and toward the back. The tiny pins sticking out inside the port indicate that this is a male port. In fact, both of the ports on the Braille Lite that are next to each other are male ports. You can plug in the Braille Lite connector into this port easily since it is female and the port is male. Feel for the port that is below the two small male ports we've just described. It is larger and has tiny holes in it. This is a female parallel port. We'll get into how to choose between ports later on. For now, let's continue dealing with the serial connection. Now check out the other end of the cable that came with your Braille Lite. It may be male or female. Depending on its gender and that of the port to which you're connecting it, you may have to get a gender changer. You plug the opposite sex end of the gender changer to the Braille Lite cable, then plug the other end of the gender changer into the port on the device. Usually, you can get serial gender changers from your local computer store. But to avoid a costly mistake, make sure you're specific when telling the salesperson the sex of your connector and the sex of the port. 13.1.3 Number of Pins Another issue is the number of pin locations on the connector and the number that the port can accept. This number must match exactly or, once again, you'll need an adapter. The Braille Lite connector for other devices is a 25-pin connector and many ports today are also 25-pin ports. So you may not have a problem. But if the port is serial and even the right gender, and you have only a 9-pin cable, you'll need an adapter. Here again, it's not crucial that you understand the technical details. But you do need to know what kind of connector you have and what kind of port you're trying to link with so that your salesperson can sell you the right adapter. 13.1.4 Null Modem Cable Requirements To connect the Braille Lite to a modem, to another Braille Lite or Braille 'n Speak, and to some computers, you need a special cable called a "null modem" cable or adapter. Some Apple computers, for example, require one, although an IBM PC-compatible does not. The important pieces of information to note here are the genders and the number of pins each connector and port needs in order to match up precisely. When you purchase a Braille Lite, an interface kit containing gender changers, a null modem adapter, and even a minitester comes with the unit to help with technical problems. Now that we've established the cable requirements, let's look at what you need to do to prepare the Braille Lite for stepping out into the world of other devices. 13.2 Telecommunications Settings Assuming you've cabled everything correctly, you still need to make sure that your Braille Lite telecommunications settings match those on the other device. Often times, trouble arises from simply having mismatched speeds or duplex settings or whatever. In this section, we look at how to determine the status of these settings and how to change them. Both devices you are linking together must "talk the same language" and be polite enough to "listen" to each other without interrupting. It's also crucial that they communicate at the same rate of speed so that one isn't overwhelmed by the dizzying rate, or turned off by the sedate pace, of the other. Before you start hooking things up, check the manual of the other device for the status of telecommunications settings preset from the factory on that device (referred to as the "default" settings). If you need to change any settings, chances are, it'll be easier to do from the Braille Lite's side of the link than from the other side. To see the status of telecommunications settings in the Braille Lite, you look them up in the Status menu. From there, you can change them, or simply exit the Status menu with either a z- chord or e-chord. On the other hand, if you just want to change a setting but don't need to see its present status, you can change it from the Parameters menu. We'll show you both as we go through the telecommunications settings one at a time. 13.2.1 Baud Rate The speed at which characters are transmitted to and from a device is called the Baud rate. It is preset to 9600 Baud, or 960 characters per second, in the Braille Lite. To see the present value of this setting, get into the Status menu with an st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord) and enter a b. The Braille Lite tells you the current setting, in this case, "9600 Baud". You can write the first digit, or the first and second digits, of the setting you want instead (using dropped numbers, as always). The possible settings are: 150, 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 19200, and 38400. Where the first digit is not specific enough to identify the desired rate, you may need to write the second digit as well. For example, if you need to set the Braille Lite to 150 Baud, you must write 15 since 19200 is another possible Baud rate and the Braille Lite can't guess which of the two you want. However, if you need to set the Braille Lite to 2400 Baud, you can simply write a 2 and the Braille Lite understands. Remember to exit the Status menu with an e- chord to return to your previous work area. If you just want to change the Baud rate without checking its present value, bring up the Parameters menu by pressing a p-chord from wherever you're working. The Braille Lite says, "Enter parameter". Write a b and at the "Enter Baud rate" prompt, simply write the first digit, or first and second digits, of your choice. The Braille Lite doesn't repeat the Baud rate you've entered. It just says, "Okay." However, if you write an invalid setting, it says, "Invalid input" and leaves you back where you were last working. You'll need to start all over again with a p-chord b to issue a valid setting. 13.2.2 Parity Parity works to keep your transmission error-free. All you need to know is that it can be set to Even, Odd or None. The default is None. Get into the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write a p. The Braille Lite says, "No parity". To change it, write an e for Even or an o for Odd. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. To change parity from the Parameters menu, press a p-chord. At the "Enter parameter" prompt, write a p. The Braille Lite says, "Enter parity, None, Even, Odd". When you write the first letter of a choice, the Braille Lite simply confirms, "Okay" and leaves you back in your previous work area. 13.2.3 Duplex This setting deserves special notice because it affects what you hear during a transmission as well as what exactly is being transmitted. There are three choices: Half duplex, Full duplex and None. In the following discussion, we assume that your Braille Lite is set to transmit data. In other words, its serial port is "active", ready to send and receive data. When duplex is set to half, the default value, everything you write - your responses to prompts, for example - is stored in your currently open file as well as sent out the serial port to another device. If you accidentally fail to press the spacebar when pressing a chord, a character (the non-chorded keys) is appended to the end of the text in your currently open file. When duplex is set to full, everything you write is sent out the port and nothing is stored in your currently open file. Therefore, full duplex is generally more desirable. If you have your Braille Lite connected to a computer, you'll usually want to set the Braille Lite to full duplex mode. When duplex is set to none, what you write is stored in your currently open file but it is not transmitted to the other device. This is most useful when transmitting a file from the Braille Lite directly to a printer. Otherwise, each time you send a carriage return or whenever the printer receives all it can handle, it might print before you are ready. Enter the Status menu and write a d to hear the current setting of duplex. Change it by writing an f or an n. Then exit The Status menu with the usual e-chord. Or, enter the Parameters menu and write a d. The Braille Lite says, "Enter duplex: half, full or none". Enter a choice by writing its first letter and the Braille Lite responds, "Okay", leaving you back in your currently open file. 13.2.4 Data Bits The next setting to consider is the data length, or "data bits" setting. The possible options are 7 and 8, with 8 being the most commonly used setting. To see the present status of data bits, enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write a dots 4-5-6 character. The Braille Lite should say, "8 data bits". You can change it, if necessary, by writing a dropped 7. That is your only other option in this case. The only time you need to worry about this setting at all is when the device at the other end requires a setting of 7 instead of 8 data bits. Remember to exit the Status menu with an e-chord. To change the data bits setting from the Parameters menu, press a p-chord and at the "Enter parameter" prompt, write a dots 4-5-6 character. The Braille Lite says, "Enter data bits". It assumes that you know your choices. If you write an invalid entry, the Braille Lite says, "Invalid input" and kicks you back into your currently open file. To set a valid data bits setting, you must start the process over again. 13.2.5 Stop Bits This telecommunications setting has only two choices: 1 and 2. Generally, devices require only 1 stop bit. To see which way the stop bits parameter is presently set, enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write an s. The Braille Lite says, "1 stop bit." Change it to 2, if necessary, by writing a dropped 2. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord to return to the file in which you were working. Or, if you just want to change stop bits, press a p-chord to enter the Parameters menu. At the prompt, write an s and the Braille Lite says, "Enter stop bits". As always, an invalid entry kicks you back into your currently open file. To restart the process, you need to re-enter the Parameters menu. 13.2.6 Handshaking Handshaking refers to a sort of traffic cop, telling one device to stop sending while the other deals with information it has received. For example, if the Braille Lite keeps sending to a printer which is not able to process the information coming into it, you could lose text. So, handshaking keeps information flowing. The three choices are None, Software handshaking and Hardware handshaking. What's important here is to match the Braille Lite's setting with what the other device expects. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write an h. The Braille Lite may say any one of the three choices, something like, "Software handshake". To change it to one of the other two, simply write the first letter of your choice. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. You may also set handshaking from the Parameters menu. At the "Enter parameter" prompt, write an h. The Braille Lite says, "Enter Hardware, Software or None". Write the first letter of an option and the Braille Lite responds, "Okay", leaving you back in your currently open file. When transmitting from a PC to the Braille Lite, we recommend not using the "None" handshake setting because it will cause loss of data. Next, we'll look at a few parameters that affect how your data appears when it's sent and how your Braille Lite is affected by transmission of data. Though you don't have to match these parameters on both ends of the link, you should understand how they can be of help, and how they can create potential snags if they're set incorrectly. 13.2.7 The Interactive Mode Recall from Chapter 4 that, in order to have the Braille Lite echo what you write, the Interactive mode must be "on". The easiest way to enable or disable it is with a g-chord. When you enable it, the Braille Lite says, "Interactive, okay" and when you disable it, the Braille Lite says, "Off, okay". To see the current status of Interactive mode, enter the Status menu and write a g. The Braille Lite tells you its status. Change it with a y (for on) and an n for off) and exit the Status menu with an e-chord. So what does all this have to do with communications? When interactive mode is "on", not only is text you write spoken, text coming into the Braille Lite through its serial port is also spoken. This can be especially vital when you're connected to a bulletin board through a modem, for example. If you want to listen to everything coming in through the serial port, you can. However, this slows down the whole transmission process. Even with speech set to maximum speed, the Braille Lite's voice lags behind the transmission. On the other hand, having Interactive mode on means that you'll know when transmission has stopped or when you are being prompted by the other device. It also means that if you halt speech with an e-chord and data continues to transmit, the voice will resume and you'll be able to "catch up" - so to speak. 13.2.8 Rejecting Ornamentation This is the parameter that controls what kinds of characters are accepted as part of a transmission. Computer networks can generate cute graphic characters (like smiley faces and Greek symbols, and even characters that draw boxes around text). You can lock out such characters from ever intruding into your file. Most likely, all you want is the content in your Braille Lite, not the fancy squiggles sighted readers find so aesthetically pleasing. When you set the Reject Ornamentation parameter "on", the Braille Lite effectively screens out strings of three or more spaces, stars, or any other characters that produce ornamentation in the text or affect the layout of the text in some way. To check the status of the Ornamentation parameter, enter the Status menu and write an o. You change the setting on and off with a y or n. Most of the time, you'll want to keep it "off" unless you're hooked up to a device that is constantly sending you extra stars and the like. You can also change this setting by pressing a p-chord to enter the Parameters menu. Write an o and the Braille Lite prompts, "Reject ornamentation characters; enter y or n." Respond according to your need at the time and you hear, "Okay", finding yourself back in your currently open file. Now that you have an elementary understanding of telecommunications settings and how to match them to the device you're linking with your Braille Lite, you are ready to skip to the chapters of this section that particularly interest you. CHAPTER 14: THE PORTABLE DISK DRIVE We spend very little time explaining standard computer terms - formatting a disk, operating system, textfile, etc. We assume you're familiar with these basic computer terms or have access to training on them. Rather, our focus is on the Braille Lite's interaction with other devices. The portable disk drive is the Braille Lite's passport to the world of computers. It lets you work with standard 3-1/2 inch disks formatted for an MS DOS (IBM PC-compatible) computer. You can load text documents (ASCII textfiles) into the Braille Lite, read them, edit them, even transfer them back onto disks. You can load programs (applications) specially written for the Braille Lite - such as the checkbook writer and spellchecker - adding even more power to your unit. You can list the contents of a disk (a directory), format a disk (prepare it to receive information), delete files on the disk, create new ones, etc. The disk drive can format and read either 720K or 1.44MB (low- and high- density) disks. When you command the drive to format a disk, it determines whether the disk is low- or high-density and formats accordingly. 14.1 How to Operate the Disk DRive The disk drive connects to the Braille Lite's second port, the one closest to you on the left side of the unit. A cable comes with the drive when you purchase it. Position the drive with the slot where the disk goes facing toward you. Rest the unit on a flat, stable surface - like a desk. Now look at the back of the device. Starting from the left, the first thing you find is a rocker switch which powers the disk drive. It comes in the "Off" position from the factory, rocked to the right. To turn on the disk drive, you rock it to the left. But don't do that yet. To the right of the power switch is the jack for your AC adapter that also comes with the disk drive at the time of purchase. The drive can be operated from its internal battery, much like the Braille Lite, and it should be fully charged when you purchase it. Nevertheless, you might want to plug your AC adapter into the unit the first time you run the drive. The disk drive needs only eight hours to attain a full recharge. Furthest to the right, along the back of the disk drive, is the female serial port that connects the drive to the Braille Lite. The cable must be connected to this port in order for the drive to power up. If you try to turn on the unit without first inserting the cable into the port, nothing will happen. To plug the cable into the disk drive, align the end of the cable that has the screws on either side to the port and press until you feel the cable mate with the port. You may have to turn the cable 180 degrees around before the cable and the port merge. Do not force the cable. When it is properly aligned, it will fit snugly. Turn the screws clockwise to secure the connection. Now connect the small end of the cable to the port closest to you on the left side of the Braille Lite as you hold it facing toward you. On this end of the cable, notice that the little square connector has a single dot on one side and two on the other. Hold the connector with the single dot pointing up as you insert it into the port on the Braille Lite. When you gently press, the connector mates easily with the port. Go ahead and turn on the disk drive now. You'll hear three distinct tones to indicate that the unit is active. Insert the disk that came with the drive, braille side up and with the characters facing away from you, into the slot in the front of the machine. The disk should click into place and a small, square button to the right of the slot should pop out toward you. When you're ready to extract this disk from the drive, simply push that button in and the disk will pop out. Mostly, you'll be storing and retrieving files to and from the disk drive and the Braille Lite. We'll go through examples of each type of transmission. 14.2 Retrieving a File from Disk First, you need to create a space in the Braille Lite to receive the incoming file. But how do you know what size to make it, and what if you make it too small? Won't you lose some of the text in the file, or couldn't you end up with a huge, empty space in your Braille Lite? If you know the size of a file in bytes (and remember that a Braille Lite "page" holds up to 4,096 characters), you can then "guestimate" how many Braille Lite "pages" are required for a file. But if you guess wrong, you're still okay, as you'll see. Let's go through a simple, concrete example of retrieving an existing file from the disk that came with the drive. Let's create a file called "disk" six Braille Lite pages long with braille translation turned off. Once you're in the file, press an s-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Storage". Now write an l and at the prompt "Load, enter filename", write the word "disk". Press an e-chord to start the transmission. You'll hear some clicks from the disk drive and some hissing noises from the Braille Lite. Within a very short time, the Braille Lite will say, "File is full" and, if Interactive mode is on, it will start speaking the text of the file. Shut up the Braille Lite by writing a dots 4-5-6-chord to go to the end of the file. Check how much room you have left with an r-chord. You should hear something like, "Room left is 11". You can read this file in the usual way. Go ahead and do that now, moving to the top of the file and either listening to the complete text or skipping around in the file. Do you have the complete file saved on the Braille Lite? Well, one way to find out is to read the current line at the end of the file with a c-chord. In the current example, you'll hear something like, "by R". Doesn't sound like the end of a document, does it. Actually, the disk drive emits a single tone when it completes sending a file to the Braille Lite, and the Braille Lite itself says, "Okay". Since this didn't happen, we can assume there is more text in the file that hasn't been transmitted yet because the Braille Lite ran out of room. The disk drive is smart enough to know when the Braille Lite can't take any more data and stops sending text. Let's see how to continue getting more of the file from the disk drive. Make the Braille Lite file bigger by 1 Braille Lite page, say. Then go to the end of the file. (This is still just after the last character the file had before you expanded it. The difference now is that there are another 4,096 empty spaces that can be filled with data from the disk drive.) Now press an s-chord. At the "Storage" prompt from the Braille Lite, write an r (for resume). This time, the disk drive should emit a single tone, indicating that it has finished sending the file, and the Braille Lite should say, "Okay" to acknowledge that it has received a complete file. Of course, this process doesn't work if you turn off the disk drive (thinking you got the whole file), and then turn it on again (when you realize you didn't). The disk drive isn't that smart. Once you turn it off, then on again, it can't remember what file it had been sending, and certainly not at what point it had stopped. Once you hear the "Okay" prompt, you can proceed as before, reading the file in the usual way. Incidentally, you've probably noticed a couple of tones from the disk drive every few minutes. Don't worry; it's the drive's way of reminding you that it's still on, just as the Braille Lite has a Power Reminder feature that says "Hello" when you've left it inactive for a few minutes. Now, how about if we want to save a file onto disk from the Braille Lite. 14.3 Saving a File to Disk There are several ways to save a file from the Braille Lite to a disk. Three common methods include: saving a file merely for backup purposes; saving a file as a "print" file ready for a printer or word processor to handle; and, saving a file as a "braille" file ready to send to a braille embosser. The simplest way to save a file from the Braille Lite to a disk - mostly used for backup purposes - is to press an s-chord from within the file and at the "Storage" prompt, write an s (for save). The Braille Lite says, "Save; enter filename". Use the MS DOS file naming conventions to name the file and press an e-chord. The disk drive spins and the Braille Lite hisses and clicks. Shortly, a single tone from the disk drive followed by an "Okay" from the Braille Lite tell you that your transfer was successful. You can check the status of braille translation through the Status menu, but this method of saving facilitates that. You don't have to think about which way your braille translator is currently set before saving the file. Another method of saving files is this: From within the file you want to save, press an s-chord. At the "Storage" prompt, write a t to save the file translated from Grade 2 braille into normal, English text (a textfile), or write a b to save the file as a Grade 2 braille file to be printed on a braille embosser. For clarity, you might answer the "Enter filename" prompt with "filename.txt" for "print" files and with "filename.brl" for "braille" files. The Braille Lite goes through its usual clicks and hisses and the disk drive spins. Your transfer is complete when you hear, "Okay" from the Braille Lite and a single tone from the drive. A note of caution: In our present discussion, we haven't addressed physical page layout - page length, margins, centering, etc. Before you save a file as a "print" or "braille" file you intend to send to a printer or braille embosser, you must set up the appropriate page format for the file. Otherwise, your file is translated into print or Grade 2 braille but its page format may be a mess. Review Section 4.9 for a full discussion of formatting strings you can include in your files, as well as format parameters you can set from the Status menu. Whether you're transmitting an application (computer program) or a textfile to or from the disk drive, or perhaps a group of files, here's another, more sophisticated transmission method. 14.4 Transmitting Textfiles or Applications First, let's take a look at how this optional transmission process works, regardless of the type of file being transferred. In the next section, we'll deal specifically with transferring "programs" or "applications" to the Braille Lite. Enter the Files menu and press a t-chord (for transfer a file). The Braille Lite sees that the disk drive is connected and prompts you with, "Disk drive, enter s to send or r to receive". If you press an s-chord or an r-chord, you hear the names of the files as they are being transmitted. If you simply write an s or an r, you do not hear their names as they are being transmitted. 14.4.1 Sending Files to the Disk Drive Write an s to send files to the drive. The Braille Lite prompts you with the name of the file to which you're pointing in your files list and tells you whether that file is "marked". Marking the Braille Lite files you want to send prepares them for transmission. You can navigate through your files list to hear which files are marked. If you don't want the file you're pointing to sent to the disk drive, unmark it with an n. Then move through your files list, unmarking files with an n: forward with a dot 4-chord or backward with a dot 1-chord, to the beginning and end of the files list with an l-chord and dots 4-5-6-chord as usual. When you find a file you do want to send, write a y to "mark" it for sending. There's a quicker way to mark and unmark files. When you find a file you want to mark, press a y-chord to mark the file. This automatically moves you to the next file in your files list. Finally, if you want to send all the files in your Braille Lite files list, write an m to mark them all at once. Write a u to "unmark" your entire files list all at once and select individual files to send. You can also use "wildcard" characters to mark groups of files with similar names. (See Section 6.7 for details on wildcard characters.) Press an m-chord or u-chord to mark or unmark a specific group of files that have similar names. For example, suppose you have several files with names like, "names.brl" and "books.brl". Press an m-chord followed by the characters "*.brl" (that's an asterisk, a period, then the letters brl). All files with names that end in ".brl" are marked for sending to the drive. Similarly, a u-chord followed by "*.brl" unmarks that group of files so that they are not sent. And, are you remembering to use computer braille - dots 1-6 for the asterisk, dots 1-4-5-6 for the question mark, and dots 4-6 for the period? By the way, you can toggle between marking and unmarking the file to which you're pointing by pressing the spacebar. When you've marked all the files you want to send to the drive, press an e-chord to let the Braille Lite start sending files. You hear the drive spin and nothing much from your Braille Lite until it finishes sending. Then it prompts you with "Okay, enter file command". Remember, you started this process from within your Files menu; the Braille Lite knows that. So it leaves you there when it completes the transmission. 14.4.2 Receiving Files from the Disk Drive From the Files menu, press a t-chord. At the prompt, "Disk drive; enter s for send or r to receive", write an r. The Braille Lite prompts, "Enter filename" and waits for you to write the name of a known file on the disk in the drive or a group of similarly named files. Press an e-chord to let the Braille Lite start receiving. You may use wildcard characters for similarly named groups of files, as illustrated above. After you press the e-chord to signal the Braille Lite to begin receiving files from the drive, you should hear the drive spin and eventually the Braille Lite say, "Okay". Files from the drive are appended to the end of your Braille Lite files list. * However, if there is already a file in your Braille Lite with the same name as a file you're trying to transmit from disk, you hear a prompt, "file exists. delete, skip rename or abort." Choose d to delete your Braille Lite file and replace it with the incoming file. Choose s to skip the file and move to the next one on disk to transmit. When you choose r for Rename the Braille Lite still transmits the file, but it also adds a .0 extension to your old file to distinguish it from the new one. Choose a for abort to cancel the entire transmission procedure and return to the Files menu on the Braille Lite. Next, let's see how to receive a file that is a program or application, not a textfile. 14.5 Adding an Application to the Braille Lite Up to now, we've been talking exclusively about sending and receiving textfiles - that is, files with text you can read in them. As you may know, the other type of file a computer uses is a "program", a file that instructs the computer on how to do something, like run a word processor or a spreadsheet application. For the Braille Lite there are new applications being developed all the time that you can add to your unit - for example, the checkbook writer. You can send to the Braille Lite an application - or binary file - using the Transfer command just described. We'll use the handy financial calculator as our example so you can find out how much interest you're actually going to pay on the loan you just took out to buy your Braille Lite. Insert the disk whose label starts with "checkbook" into your drive. From the Files menu, press a t-chord, as before. This time, answer with an r. The Braille Lite says, "Enter filename". Respond, "fcalc.*". This way, both the "fcalc.bns" and "fcalc.doc" files will be transmitted. The Braille Lite recognizes files with ".bns" extensions as programs and the file with an extension of "doc" is probably the file that tells you how to use the program. Press an e-chord. The disk drive spins and eventually the Braille Lite says, "Okay". Obviously, if the file is not on the disk, you hear an error message. As you'll see in a minute, you can check what files are on a disk. For now, we'll assume that things worked fine and you have the file in your Braille Lite. Go to the end of your files list to see the name of the last file. You should hear, "File number x, fcalc.bns, external program" (where x is the number of the file in your files list). Press a dot 1-chord to back up a file and hear, "File number x, fcalc.doc". The Braille Lite knows that the file with extension "bns" is not a textfile. Press a dot 4-chord to point to it again and open it. You'll see that when you try to read it, you hear gibberish. That's because this file is meant to be "run", as like you run your spellchecker, and not "read" as you would read your address file. To run this special calculator program, you'll need to read its user guide, called "fcalc.doc". There are two ways to run the program: Simply press an o-chord to get into the Options menu, then write an x. The Braille Lite says, "Enter program to execute". Write "fcalc" and press an e-chord, the Braille Lite loads the program and gives you its first prompt. Quit this particular program with a q from its main menu. You'll be back in the Files menu at the prompt, "Enter file command". Or, bring up the Files menu and point to the "fcalc.bns" file by pressing dot 4-chords until you're on it. In our example, you could just press a dots 4-5- 6-chord to reach the last file in your files list, which is the file we want. Then press an x-chord. The Braille Lite loads the program, and it gives you its first prompt. As we said above, the Braille Lite recognizes files with the ".bns" extension as external programs and automatically write-protects them. Files with extensions .bin, .bns, .com, .dic, .exe, and .sys, are also write-protected automatically. You can delete such files, but you cannot write in them. If you're not ready to explore the financial calculator, delete it at this time, or save it for when you're more comfortable with your unit's overall features. 14.6 Reading the Directory from a Disk We cover the directory command here since you must know what's on a disk to use it effectively. But we won't describe all the commands you can use with the disk drive - such as Format a disk, or Kill a file on disk. These commands assume an understanding of MS DOS. They all begin with the s-chord and are followed by the first letter of the command. For example, s-chord followed by k is the command for "killing" a file on disk. A list of disk drive functions is in the Braille Lite Help file and in Appendix B. From anywhere within your currently open file, press an s-chord followed by a d. The Braille Lite says, "Directory; enter filename". Respond with n e- chord for a complete list sorted alphabetically and with file size information only. Or respond with the specific file on the disk whose name you know, or a specific group of files whose names all end with, say, "bns", using wildcard characters. Then press an e-chord. Add /n after the d to get an unsorted list of files. Write a /w after the d if you want the files alphabetically sorted and you want to see the dates and times they were last modified. Whichever way you invoke the directory command, momentarily, the Braille Lite will have received the directory, and if Interactive mode is on, it will start saying, "Volume label is . . ." and begin listing files. Is this list being transmitted into your currently open file? No. Luckily, the Clipboard - that scratchpad area that holds things for you in the Braille Lite - is receiving the directory list. You can read through it from the Clipboard file as you read any other text. * One new trick is that you can load a file into your Braille Lite directly from the Clipboard as you read through the directory of files. Bring your cursor onto the file you want to load, then press s-chord g. The file is automatically loaded into your Braille Lite at the end of your files list. Check out the section on sophisticated modem protocols in the next chapter, because you can also use the s-chord command with the ymodem protocol. And using it can save you time. The disk drive opens up a whole new infinite realm of possibilities for you to explore. Printers let you communicate with others by physically producing your work on paper. Computers and modems - especially modems - can broaden your options even further. And speaking of printers and other computers, we turn to them next. CHAPTER 15: PRINTERS, MODEMS, AND COMPUTERS 15.1 Transmission Considerations Your Braille Lite is preset from the factory for 9600 Baud, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, half duplex, and software handshaking. If you're unfamiliar with these terms and you don't know what your other device expects these settings to be, review Section 13.2 before continuing. It might save you countless hours of frustration the first time you try to transmit data between the Braille Lite and another device. And while we're about it, if you bypassed the discussion of cables (Section 13.1), we suggest you take a minute to skim over that section, as well. Wrong cables account for a considerable amount of technical support questions and needless frustration. Now let's talk about a couple of settings on the Braille Lite we deliberately left out of Section 13.2 to avoid confusion. 15.1.1 Activating the Serial Port To conserve power, the serial port on the Braille Lite is normally turned off. Before you can communicate with any external device through this port, you must activate it. The longer the serial port is active, the greater the drain on the Braille Lite's battery. Don't think anything is wrong with the battery if you start getting "Battery low" warning messages after only seven hours of use, for instance. If you've made heavy use of the port, the battery drains quickly. There is no reminder that the serial port is active once your unit is turned on. If the serial port was left active the last time you turned off the Braille Lite, when you next turn it on, the start-up message says, "Braille Lite ready, serial port". So it's important to turn off the serial port immediately upon completing communications with another device to save battery power. Of course, you can check whether the port is active. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write an f. The Braille Lite says, "Serial port, off." To turn it on, write a y. To turn it off later, write an n. Or, press a p-chord to bring up the Parameters menu. At the "Enter parameter" prompt, write a dots 2-6-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Serial port, enter y or n". Whatever your choice, the Braille Lite may only squeak in response, although most of the time, you'll hear the confirming prompt, "Okay". This setting is hard to change on purpose to avoid accidental activation of the serial port. 15.1.2 Appending Linefeeds Back in Chapter 4, we explained the difference between a carriage return and a linefeed and why it is that you don't really need to have linefeeds present in your files on the Braille Lite. Let's revisit this briefly to see how it applies to our present discussion on transmitting text. In effect, a carriage return moves the cursor to the left margin of a line. In the Braille Lite, it doesn't affect your reading because you are not physically moving up and down a piece of paper to read. So the carriage return serves only as a marker. A linefeed, on the other hand, moves the cursor to the next line on the page. Once again, in a Braille Lite file, linefeeds are meaningless because you're not physically moving vertically along a piece of paper. However, it's clear that when you print the contents of a Braille Lite file, you need both carriage returns and linefeeds. Otherwise, a printer will simply print the first line of text, then return the carriage to the left margin and print the next line, and the next, and the next, without ever moving down the page. And you can guess what a jumble of letters you'll have - all on the same line. (Some printers actually refuse to print at all if they don't receive pairs of carriage returns and linefeeds.) Luckily, there's a provision built into the Braille Lite to deal with this. Enter the Status menu with the st-sign-chord. Write an a. The Braille Lite says something like, "Add linefeed when transmitting, off". Turn this parameter "on" with a y and "off" with an n. Unless you're transmitting, you'll want it off. Or press a p-chord to bring up the Parameters menu. Write an a for "Add linefeeds" and turn on the setting before you transmit your file. A word of caution: The Add Linefeeds setting is not file-specific, even if the setting to make parameters file-specific in the Status menu is "on". This is important because, if you forget to turn it off when you're through printing, all your files will retain linefeeds and that may cause other transmission problems. Next, let's quickly revisit page formatting to make sure your printouts come out just right. * 15.2 Physical Page Format Considerations When sending text directly to a printer, braille embosser, or computer, you want it to look right in that environment. In other words, if the text is going to a printer, you probably want the page length to be 54 lines with top, bottom, left, and right margins of about an inch, for example. If the text is going to a braille embosser, on the other hand, no doubt you'll want something like a page length of 25 lines,a line width of 40 characters, and Grade 2 braille. As you'll recall, these format considerations can be handled simply by including special formatting strings in your file as you write, and by setting certain parameters at transmission time. Review Section 4.9 for a complete discussion of formatting strings and parameters. Here we'll only focus on settings and formatting strings that affect the actual process of printing or brailling. All of these formatting strings can be added temporarily and removed once the commands they initiate have been performed by the printer or braille embosser. * 15.2.1 Printing Text Without Translating There may be times when you want a portion of your file not to be translated from Grade 2 braille because you've written it in computer braille, instead. For example, say your document explains how to write a certain MS DOS command that has slashes in it. If you do nothing to warn the Braille Lite, when it prints your file to an ink printer, every slash will be printed as an "st". In fact, you should be aware of this even as you write it because the Braille Lite will pronounce things like "/w" as "s t w". To prevent the Braille Lite from accidentally translating something you don't want translated, you have two options for temporarily stopping translation. Place a ' $brl+ ' just before the text you want to print untranslated, and a ' $brl- ' just before the place where you want translation to resume. Or use the symbol, dot 4 followed by a dash (dots 3-6) at the beginning of a group of characters you don't want translated, and a dot 4 followed by an l when you want translation to resume. Like the $ formatting strings, the dot 4 symbol requires spaces around it. So you'd write something like, "space, dot 4, dash, space, Do not translate this text., space, dot 4, l, space". Either method works. It's just a matter of preference. If you just want one character not to be translated - say, an asterisk (dots 1-6 in computer braille) - place a dot 4 before the character. * 15.2.2 Finding out What Page is Being Printed There are two ways to find out what page is being printed. You can either insert the string ' $st ' at the place where you want specifically to hear what page is being printed. As it's printing, the Braille Lite will announce, "Status directive encountered on Page x, Line x" at the place you wrote the formatting string in your file (the x's being the actual number of the page and line printing at the time). Or, you could always just press the spacebar as you're printing at any time to hear what page is being printed. This way you don't have to add a special string into your file at any particular point in the file. * 15.2.3 Transmitting a Portion of a Document Although we covered this in Section 4.9.6, we review it here for clarity. There are two ways you can limit how much of your document actually goes to the printer or braille embosser. For example, you might just want to print out Page 1 to see how your text is lining up in the columns you set up. At the point where you want the printer to stop, write a ' $ef ' in your file. When you transmit your document to the printer, it will stop at the place immediately before your ' $ef ' string. But what if your printer jammed on Page 4 and you need to start from there. Just before the place where you want the printer to skip the text, write a ' $( ' into your file. Just before the place where you want the printer to start paying attention again and begin printing, write a ' $) '. Even if you're not sure of the physical location in your file where the printer would begin Page 4, there is a way to find that out before you actually insert the strings we've just described. In Section 15.2.5, we'll show you how to figure out where the word you're on would print on a physical page and line. * 15.2.4 Double-Spacing a Document on the Fly In Section 4.9.4, we described how you can place a formatting string into your file so that your document will print out with a blank line in between each line of text. This type of printout is often used in a school setting where a professor wants to be able to add comments to your paper or exam. In some cases, you'll want to have only a portion of your document print double-spaced, and then the rest print out single-spaced (which is the standard way to print out a document). The formatting strings discussed in Section 4.9.4 are best for that scenario because you can place them exactly where you want the text to print out double- and single-spaced respectively. But if you want the whole document to print double-spaced , it's quicker to use the Status menu setting for double-spacing. Enter the Status menu with the usual st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord) and jump to the setting with an ar-sign. Double-spacing is set to "off" from the factory. Write a y to turn it on. Now, when you print your document, or when you check out how many pages the printed document would contain, you'll get a very different answer because, of course, it's as if the document were itself doubled in size. The good thing is that it doesn't take up any more room in your Braille Lite since the setting in the Status menu controls the additional blank lines. It's just like the Add Linefeeds setting in this respect. It doesn't change the way your file looks on the braille display, or make the Braille Lite's voice read the file differently. It just affects the printout of the file. Unless you have the setting that makes parameters file-specific turned off, double-spacing is only in effect for the currently open file. That's probably the way you want it because, otherwise, all your documents would print out double-spaced., * 15.2.5 Checking out Where Text Would Appear on a Physical Page Remember from Section 4.9.5 that you can control page numbering for both print and braille files with format strings. Also, recall that there's a setting in the Status menu that you can turn on to number your pages if you don't want or need to include format strings in your file. You can check how many physical print or braille pages your file would contain before you actually print or braille it on physical paper. By now you know how essential it is to set up your page format parameters to get accurate margins and page lengths, etc. Always check page format parameters in your currently open file before you transmit it to a printer or braille embosser to make sure the settings match your expectations. Let's look at an example. Suppose you want to print a file containing 500 characters of text all in Grade 2 braille. We can't be exactly sure how many print or braille pages that file turns into without knowing how many blank lines you have and how many carriage returns you physically put into the file. But even beyond that, if you set your page format parameters for "print" with say, 66 lines per page and 65 characters per line, when the Braille Lite counts the number of pages, it will determine a very different number than if you had set your page format parameters to a page length of 25 and a line length of 40, as for a braille file. The whole business can be confusing. But you can stay on top of it by checking whether the file is a "braille" or "print" file, by checking your page format parameters before checking how many physical pages will be printed or brailled, and certainly before transmitting the file itself. Even with Page Numbering turned off in the Status menu, as long as you have a print or braille page length greater than 0, you can get a reading on how many physical pages your file will contain when it's printed or brailled. Working with our example of a 500-character, Grade 2 braille file, go to the end of the file and press an sh-sign-chord (dots 1-4-6-chord). The Braille Lite says, "Enter p, b, or a". After you write either a p or b, the Braille Lite hisses for a couple of seconds. Eventually, it says something like, "Page 2, line 17". Assuming you responded with a p, you now know that when you actually print out this file, it will contain two pages and the second of the two will be only about a third of the way full of text. If you had chosen a b response and you got this reading, you could assume that the file would braille out as a two-page document with the second page almost two-thirds full of text. If you choose the "a" option, you'll get a reading on how many "absolute"Braille Lite pages there are in your file up to the point where your cursor is resting. In our 500character file, you're still on Braille Lite page 1, of course, since a Braille Lite "page" is 4,096 characters long. There can be a problem if you don't have Page-numbering turned on and you have a braille or print page length of 0 set in the Status menu. In this scenario, when you invoke the sh-sign-chord and choose the p or b response, you hear, "No page format set". We suggest you try a few test runs, setting up page format parameters and using the page-numbering setting as trials, before you actually trust that things will be transmitted as you expect. All printers and braille embossers, especially printers, have quirks that may require different values than we recommend for the settings. Nevertheless, once you get these page format issues under control, you should be transmitting virtually flawlessly formatted documents all the time. It's a matter of practice. Now, we're now finally ready to tackle actually transmitting blocks of text from the Braille Lite to another device. 15.3 Sending Blocks of Text to Another Device In this section, we deal specifically with sending blocks of text from the Braille Lite to another device, such as a printer. Naturally, a block of text can be a whole file. But it can just as easily be less than that. Of course, you can use the commands discussed here to transmit blocks of text to other devices as well as printers. But look at Section 15.5 for more sophisticated ways to transmit files to and from computers. When you're sending blocks of text directly from the Braille Lite to a printer, you must choose the format (braille or print), and you must consider things like page length, line width, and page numbering - as we discussed in the previous section. Formatting the text from the Braille Lite is less important if you intend to edit the text with a word processor after you've sent it to a computer. But certainly, you'll want your format to be just right if you're going to transmit directly to a printer. A telecommunications program can facilitate adjusting telecommunications settings to match those on the Braille Lite. Furthermore, such a program can perform error-checking during the transmission. We won't recommend a specific telecommunications package, but you'll find several shareware versions that work well with speech synthesizers and screen access programs. For our discussion, we'll assume you have such a program and are familiar with its use. Remember to address those essential, physical page format parameter considerations before you send text to a printer or you may find the resulting printout very strange indeed. Now, let's go through the mechanics of the transmission process. You can send text from the Braille Lite to another device in the following ways: the entire file, a single line, paragraph or a block of text. Each of these options starts with a t-chord. Writing a certain letter after the "Enter transmit parameter" prompt sends the desired amount of text to the other device. Sending the entire file, a line, or paragraph is straightforward. When you're ready to send text from your currently open file, place your cursor where you want the transmission to begin, then press a t-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter transmit parameter". Write an l, p, or z to indicate whether you are sending from the current cursor position to the end of the current line (l), paragraph (p), or entire text from the cursor forward (z). To send a block of text, that does not extend to the end of the file, you need to define the block. Before issuing the t-chord, you must "mark" the block to be transmitted. Find the final character you want to include in your transmission. Move beyond it one character with a dot 6-chord. Mark the place by pressing an m-chord. Then move to your starting point, the first character you want to include in your transmission. Now that you have defined the block to transmit, press a t-chord. At the "Enter transmit parameter" prompt, write an m. All the text from your current cursor location to the mark is transmitted. The commands t-chord a (or t), t-chord b, and t-chord s reduce the number of steps you need to perform in order to transmit text. t-chord a (or t) automatically moves the cursor to the beginning of your file and transmits everything within that file. Any format conditions you have in effect are honored: margins, line and page length, etc. t-chord b sends text from the beginning to the end of the file but it turns off the braille translator. It is the command of choice to transmit text directly to a braille embosser. Any format values you may have set are in effect. If page numbering is on, braille page numbers are included in the printout in literary braille notation. t-chord s performs steps which are essential if you want to send "clean" text to a device for backup purposes only. If you want no format considerations, no braille translation, and all of your text sent, then use t-chord s. It sends your cursor to the beginning of the file, turns off the braille translator, if it is on, and sets all format parameters to 0 before transmitting the entire file. Those are the different ways to send blocks of text from the Braille Lite to another device. but wait. Don't start printing just yet. Since the Braille Lite also has a parallel port through which you can transmit, let's show you how that works. All you have to do differently is to use chords instead of plain letters to select one of the options. So, when you press a t-chord and get the prompt, "Enter transmit parameter", press a second t-chord (for the entire file), b- chord, l-chord, m-chord, p-chord, s-chord, or z-chord to send the transmission through the parallel port. No, that first option wasn't a misprint. Instead of using an a-chord to transmit "all" text in your file, you need to press a second t-chord because, of course, a-chord is dot 1-chord and dot 1-chord takes you back a choice in the options list for the t-chord command. Anyone who does a lot of printing knows how much paper is wasted in printouts that didn't come out right for one reason or another. One final thing you can do before actually transmitting a file to a printer or braille embosser is to print the file to another file. What? How could that be of use, you might wonder. What we're suggesting here is transmitting your file with all of its formatting strings - as if it were going to a printer or braille embosser - to another file in your Braille Lite. Transmitting the file as if it were going to a real printer means that all formatting strings are replaced by the actual physical layout of the text - with pages numbered, say, with headers maybe, with indented sections, etc. Then you can examine the layout carefully and make any necessary corrections to the file that still has the formatting strings. It might also save a few trees. To print to a file, from wherever you want to start in your currently open file, press a t-chord. At the prompt, "Enter transmit parameter", write an f. The Braille Lite repeats, "Enter transmit parameter". At this point you can choose any of the options we've just described (a, b, l, m, p, s, or z). The Braille Lite then prompts, "Enter filename". Write a filename like, "test1" and press an e-chord. If the name you write doesn't exist already, your file is transmitted to the file called "test1" and the Braille Lite says, "Okay" when it's done. * However, if there is already a file in your Braille Lite called "test1", you hear a prompt, "file exists. delete, skip rename or abort." When you choose d, the currently open file replaces the old one. When you choose r for Rename the Braille Lite still transmits your file to "test1", but it also adds a .0 extension to your old file. When you select s or a, the whole transfer process is cancelled. We recommend setting "Display all" to on and turning on 8-dot braille. Most likely, you'll find it easier to check through the file to see how it would appear on paper by reading it on the braille display, rather than by listening to it with the Braille Lite's voice. Here's one instance where the braille display can really facilitate matters. Chances are, an error in layout will leap out at you when you're reading with the display; whereas, with the voice, you may or may not catch every layout glitch. * 15.4 Modems and Other Computers Modems are special devices that link two computers together through the telephone line. You hook up a computer to your phone line by connecting the computer first to the modem and then the modem to the phone jack (or to the phone itself). The computer you're calling is similarly linked to a phone line through a modem. We won't spend time on how modems work. These devices, too, have manuals which describe their setup and detail the commands to which they respond. For example, you can tell a modem to dial a phone either by tones or by dial pulses, to dial 9 first, wait for a specified period before dialing the rest of the other computer's phone number, to answer the telephone when it rings and on which ring to answer, etc. The computer on your end of such a connection could easily be your Braille Lite. Now turning to computers, if you have a computer and want to transmit data between it and your Braille Lite, you need to run a telecommunications program in that computer. This program sets up the computer to receive information from an outside source - in this case, your Braille Lite. As with printers, having the correct cable goes a long way toward making things easy. Blazie Engineering has telecommunications programs for the IBM PC and simple file capture programs for both the IBM PC compatible and the Apple families of computers. Also, there are several shareware products that work well with screen access programs. In addition, we have programs that come with our external disk drive - such as the checkbook writer and the financial calculator. Since these programs come on an MS DOS compatible 3-1/2 inch floppy disk, even if you don't have a disk drive, you can still load them into your Braille Lite by using a PC. Check with our Customer Support staff to find out how to obtain any of these programs. Now let's see how to connect the Braille Lite to devices other than printers. To link your Braille Lite to a modem, to another Braille Lite, and to some computers (like some Apple models), you need a "null modem" cable or adapter. As we mentioned in Section 15.1, matching up the right cables really eases your connectivity challenges. Make sure you get a null modem cable with the right attributes to match your Braille Lite cable and the serial port on your modem or computer. (The manual for your computer or modem should indicate whether you need a null modem cable, and certainly the dealer that sold it to you should be able to provide this information. We'll focus on the IBM PC compatible since it is the computer of choice for most visually-impaired users, and since it doesn't require a null modem cable. Assuming you've connected the cables properly and have a telecommunications program running in your PC, you should be all set to transmit data. One last thing: before you start attempting to transmit data: Remember to make sure your telecommunications settings match (Baud rate, parity, data bits, stop bits, duplex and handshaking). In Section 13.2, we detailed all of these for you and explained how to change them, if necessary, on your Braille Lite. Naturally, we can't explain how your particular telecommunications program allows you to change such settings. We suggest that you go through the manual for your telecommunications program to verify what the default telecommunications settings are, and that you check out how to change them in your telecommunications program, if the need arises. Again, transmitting data can be a breeze but only if all the settings match on both your Braille Lite and the other device, and if your cables are the proper cables. Overlooking any one of these issues can cause you needless frustration and confusion. Setting it up right the first time will save you many headaches later. Back in Section 4.10, we said we'd have to introduce you to another cursor tracking mode in addition to the keyboard and cursor tracking modes we talked about in that section. If you're hazy about cursor tracking and keyboard tracking, go back and review that information in Section 4.10. It'll save you time in understanding this new tracking mode we're about to discuss. When you're hooked up to a computer or to a modem, it's likely that data is coming into your Braille Lite not just as whole files but also as prompts and menus of choices. This is especially true when you're using your modem to "talk" to a bulletin board or to another user by modem. As data comes into your Braille Lite from another device, it's automatically spoken to you. But the braille display doesn't necessarily move by itself just because data is being transmitted. Serial tracking, when turned on from the Status menu, makes the display jump you to approximately the last eighteen characters worth of the data that the other device has sent into your Braille Lite. If serial tracking is off, as it comes set from the factory, you can find out what came in from the other device by tapping the right end of the advance bar to move forward through the data that was sent. This is usually the most desirable setup; that is, you hear the data being sent, but you review it by moving your braille display formward. When you type something in response to the data that came in, whether you see what you're typing as you're writing depends on whether you have keyboard tracking in effect. If you're confused, see the telecommunications questions in Appendix A for help. There may be times when you want the display to place you at the end of the data that was sent. This is mostly in cases where you're already familiar with the menu of choices being sent by a bulletin board, for instance. You want to be where the data stopped sending so that you can tell when the braille display has stopped receiving data. To turn on serial tracking, bring up the Status menu and jump to the setting by pressing a t-chord. Write a y to turn on the setting. From now on, your braille display will jump to the end of your file at the place where the data finished coming in from the other device. To toggle serial tracking on and off on the fly without having to go into the Status menu, simply press the letter t together with the advance bar. Nevertheless, we suggest keeping it on most of the time when you're getting data from another device so you always know the last piece of infrmation that it sent. Next, we look at using modem protocols to transmit data between your Braille Lite and a computer. 15.5 Using Sophisticated Modem Protocols in Transmission So far in our discussion of transmitting data from your Braille Lite to a computer, we've talked exclusively about using the t-chord command. There is a simpler way to transmit data when you're dealing with whole files. A telecommunications program helps you to match telecommunications settings in the PC with those in your Braille Lite. It also helps to transfer your files in the most error-free manner possible. Telecommunications programs vary in their levels of sophistication. But even the most basic ones ask you whether the file you're transmitting is in ASCII. Recall that the ASCII character set is made up largely of the alphabet, punctuation marks, numbers, and so on. It is possible to transmit a file that is a program written in binary or machine language (which is not in ASCII characters) from one computer to another, and most telecommunications programs have provisions for transmitting such files. For the most part, however, files you transmit from your Braille Lite to a computer are ASCII files, even if they're in Grade 2 braille. When your telecommunications program is ready to receive a file from your Braille Lite and asks you whether you are sending it an ASCII file, you can answer, "yes" and use your t-chord command on the Braille Lite followed by the appropriate letter - b for a braille file, for example. However, MOST telecommunications packages now have more flexibility, and so does your Braille Lite. When it's ready to receive your file, a telecommunications program may also ask you whether you want to use a "modem protocol", such as xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, and even kermit. Most of the time, any of these options is probably a better choice than a straight ASCII transfer. (Note: The Braille Lite does not support zmodem.) Basically, what these options do is to take the transmission in chunks rather than one character at a time, and to perform error-checking on each chunk before accepting the next chunk. This explanation oversimplifies the concept, but at least this gives you a feel for why you might want to use a modem protocol. Let's go through a couple of examples of electing to use modem protocols for transmitting a file between the Braille Lite and your PC. Here again, we assume that all cables are connected properly, that you have matched Baud rates, parity, data bits and stop bits, etc., and we further assume that you are running a telecommunications program in your PC. First, let's look at a transfer going from the PC into your Braille Lite. From the Files menu in the Braille Lite, enter a t-chord (for transfer). The Braille Lite prompts, "Enter s to send or r to receive". If you press an s-chord or an r-chord, you hear the names of the files as they are being transmitted. If you simply write an s or an r, you don't hear their names as they are being transmitted. For now, let's write an r to receive a file. Now the Braille Lite gives you some options to consider, "Enter x for xmodem, y for ymodem, g for ymodem g or k for kermit". (Note: ymodem g does not work with 38400 Baud for a file longer than one page.) If you write an x (for xmodem), the Braille Lite asks, "Enter filename". Write the filename followed by an e-chord. The Braille Lite confirms your choice with, "Start the transfer." Obviously, on the PC side of things, you must choose x for xmodem as well in order for the transfer to work properly. If you choose y (for ymodem), g (for ymodem g), or k (for kermit), the Braille Lite does not prompt you for a filename because it gets that information as part of the transfer automatically. It creates the filename in your Braille Lite as it receives it from the PC. (Incidentally, remember the s-chord command for the disk drive? You can use the y option with that command as well to transmit files to an attached disk drive.) Now let's make sure you understand how to approach this process from the PC side. From within your telecommunications program, you select the "Upload" option. When the program asks how you want to send this PC file and offers the various choices we've just discussed, you select the one that matches what you've chosen on the Braille Lite. So choose x for xmodem, if you selected that on the Braille Lite, for example. The telecommunications program asks you for the name of the PC file you want to send. Type the filename and press the appropriate key in your telecommunications program to send the file, usually the Enter key on your PC. When the Braille Lite has received the file, it will let you know with an "Okay" prompt, followed by "Enter file command". Why that prompt? Well, remember that you issued the t-chord from the Files menu. You're still there. If you want to see the contents of the file you just received, press a dots 4-5-6-chord to bring you to the last file in your files list and then press an o-chord to open it. Now let's say that something went wrong and the transfer was aborted. In such a case, the Braille Lite says, "Transfer canceled; enter file command". You'll probably see some kind of error message on your PC, as well. If you use the xmodem) option for transmitting files, you can only transmit one file at a time. However, with ymodem or kermit, you can receive multiple files, and you can even use the wildcard characters as DETAILED in Section 6.7 and Appendix A for groups of files with similar names. For example, when your telecommunications program asks you for the name of the file you want to send, you could type "*.txt". All files that have a "txt" extension in your current PC directory are queued up and sent to the Braille Lite. Each one is added to your files list with its own name as it is received by the Braille Lite. Our whole discussion so far assumes that there are no duplicate filenames between the files you're trying to send from the PC and your Braille Lite files. But whenever the Braille Lite sees an incoming file that already exists, it stops and says, File exists, delete, skip, rename or abort." When you select d for Delete, your PC file replaces your Braille Lite file. When you choose s for Skip, the PC just moves on to the next filename you marked for it to send to your Braille Lite. When you choose r for Rename, your PC file is still sent to your Braille Lite, but the Braille Lite adds a .0 extension to your old file's name to distinguish it from the one coming in from the PC. Choosing a for Abort cancels the entire transfer process. Now let's look at sending a file from the Braille Lite to the PC, using modem protocol options. We'll use the file called "practice" we created in Chapter 4 as our sample file to transmit to the PC. Enter the Files menu and then press a t-chord. This time, respond with an s to the prompt, "Enter s to send or r to receive." Now you are prompted to, "Enter x for xmodem, 1 for xmodem 1K, y for ymodem, or k for kermit." We didn't see the option "1 for xmodem 1K" in the options for receiving files from the PC because the Braille Lite can distinguish whether it is receiving a file with plain xmodem or with xmodem with 1K protocol. Also, notice that you don't see the option "g for ymodem g" here. If you had set your PC to receive the Braille Lite file with ymodem g, simply choose the ymodem option on the Braille Lite side to send the file to the PC. If you choose either the x or 1 options for the two available xmodem choices, you can send only one Braille Lite file at a time to your PC at the same time. However, if you choose either y (for ymodem) or k (for kermit), you can send a bunch of files from your Braille Lite to the PC. When you choose the y or k options for sending files from the Braille Lite to the PC, the Braille Lite places you in your files list so that you can "mark" the files you want to send. Marking files in your files list prepares them to be sent. We'll see how in a minute. After you've marked the files you want to send, press an e-chord to start transmitting. There are several ways to mark files for transmission. One way is to move through your files list with dot 1-chords and dot 4-chords. You can press a c-chord to hear the name of the file you're pointing to repeated, and you can use l-chord and dots 4-5-6-chord to move to the beginning and end of your files list, as usual. When you come across a file you do want to send to the PC, "mark" it by writing a y. In other words, you're saying, "yes, I want to send this file". The Braille Lite responds, "filename is marked". Now you can continue through your files list, marking other files to send to the PC. As you move through your files list in this marking process, the Braille Lite tells you whether the file you're pointing to is already marked. If a file was already marked from a previous transmission that you don't want to send at the present time, you can "unmark" it by writing an n. A faster way to move through the marking process is to press a y-chord to mark a file and automatically move to the next file in your files list. The fastest way of all is to send every file in your list to the PC, say, for backup purposes. In that case, simply write an m to mark all files except Help and Clipboard. Press a u to unmark all your files at once. Yet another way to use the marking feature is to press an m-chord or u-chord to mark or unmark a specific group of files that have similar names. For example, suppose you have several files in your Braille Lite with names like, "address.brl" and "practice.brl". You can press an m-chord followed by the characters "*.brl" and all files with names that end in ".brl" are marked for sending to your PC. Similarly, you can press a u-chord followed by "*.brl" to unmark all such files so that they are not sent to your PC. By the way, pressing the spacebar toggles between marking and unmarking the file to which you're currently pointing, also. Remember, throughout this whole discussion of marking files, we've been in the middle of the transmission process. In other words, you entered your Files menu, pressed t-chord to transmit and then wrote an s for sending files from the Braille Lite to the PC. You then chose either y or k for your modem protocol. And finally, now you have marked the files you want to send. To tell the Braille Lite that you're finished marking files, as we said earlier, you press an e-chord. That says, "Okay, I'm done choosing the files I'm going to send, Braille Lite. Now go ahead and send them, please". The Braille Lite says, "Start the transfer." This means that it's ready to send and is waiting for a signal from your PC that says, "Okay, I'm ready to receive". So now, on the PC, select the "Download" option in your telecommunications program. When prompted, choose the same protocol as you chose on your Braille Lite - for example, y (for ymodem). You should hear clicking and hissing from the Braille Lite and the disk drive spinning in your PC as files come into it. In fact, you'll also hear numbers coming across your PC screen. Don't worry, these are error checking signals being emitted and it's an indication that all is well. Should things go wrong, the PC and Braille Lite will both issue messages telling you that the transfer has been aborted. In the case of the Braille Lite, you'll find yourself back in the Files menu at the prompt, "Enter file command". You can either try the transfer again or check to see whether all your telecommunications settings match up, whether there's enough room in your PC to accept files, etc. See Appendix A for more help. Now we turn to another convenient feature of the Braille Lite. It can double as a speech synthesizer with a screen access program on your PC. * 15.6 The Braille Lite as a Speech Synthesizer The Braille Lite can perform double duty. Not only can it serve as your traveling notetaker, recordkeeper, and calendar, it can be your portable speech synthesizer, as well. As long as you have the appropriate cables and a screen access program in your PC that supports the Braille 'n Speak, you can link your Braille Lite to a PC through its serial port just as you would any other external speech synthesizer. (See Section 13.1 for a full discussion of cables. Also, even though some speech synthesizers now use a parallel port, the Braille Lite's parallel port only supports printers.) Let's see how it works. First, we assume that you have a screen access program in your PC and that you understand its use. There are numerous screen access programs on the market. Blazie Engineering even has one of its own, called PC Master. We won't get into the mechanics of how your screen access program works here. But we'll explain how to link the Braille Lite to your screen access program so that you can use the Braille Lite as a speech synthesizer. The Braille Lite works as a speech synthesizer with screen access programs that support the Braille 'n Speak as a speech synthesizer. Check whether the vendor of your screen access program supports the Braille 'n Speak. If so, you may have to set up the screen access program with a Braille 'n Speak driver supplied by that vendor. You'll need to hook up the Braille Lite to the serial port of your computer, as previously described, and all the telecommunications parameters we detailed earlier, Baud rate, handshaking, and so on, must match. (You may need to use a telecommunications program to set those parameters properly on your PC but MS DOS has other ways to do this through its "Mode" command. Check your DOS manual for a detailed explanation.) To use the Braille Lite as a speech synthesizer, get into the Speech Parameters menu with the usual ar-sign-chord (dots 3-4-5-chord). Press another ar-sign-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Speech box mode on, exit." For the most part, the Braille Lite cannot accept input from its keyboard now. You can't check your calendar, perform a calculation, etc. In effect, you've turned the Braille Lite into a "dumb" device that can only accept information from your PC. The only input your Braille Lite accepts from you directly on the Braille Lite keyboard is an ar-sign-chord to re-enter the Speech Parameters menu followed by a second ar-sign-chord to turn off speech box mode. Let's practice this much. Even if you don't presently have your Braille Lite linked to another device, you can test out this process. Press ar-sign-chord twice. You'll hear "Speech box mode on, exit." Now try to write something - anything, an o-chord or a c-chord. Nothing happens. Your Braille Lite is waiting for something from your PC. Even if it isn't hooked up to one, it thinks it is and patiently waits and waits. Re-enter the Speech Parameters menu with an ar-sign-chord. Whew! That does work and you hear the usual prompt, "Enter speech parameters." Now press a second ar-sign-chord and you hear "Speech box mode off". Exit the Speech Parameters menu with an e-chord. You're back in business. The Braille Lite should now respond normally again. Assuming your Braille Lite is hooked up to a PC, a screen access program that supports it is properly installed to work with the Braille Lite, and you've turned the Braille Lite into a speech synthesizer, here's what happens: As we just said, the Braille Lite is now "dumb", patiently waiting for something from the PC. It monitors your interaction with the PC. Depending on how your screen access program is set up, every time you type a space or punctuation mark, the Braille Lite may voice the word you just typed, or it may echo every character as you type it. If you issue a command for the screen access program from the PC keyboard - such as "read me the whole screen" - the Braille Lite says the contents of your PC screen to you. A more sophisticated way of using the Braille Lite as a speech synthesizer is to turn speech box mode on with a for-sign-chord. If you enter the Speech Parameters menu and press a for-sign-chord, the Braille Lite gives you a choice about how it should read from the PC. Let's try it now. Again, you can test this out without having your Braille Lite actually hooked up to a PC. From the Speech Parameters menu, press a for-sign-chord. The Braille Lite says, "Enter l for line or b for block handshaking." Now don't confuse this prompt with our earlier discussion of handshaking and telecommunications settings. After you write an l or a b in response to the prompt, the Braille Lite says, "speech box mode on". Then you can exit the Speech Parameters menu in the usual way with an e-chord. The choice of Line or Block handshaking is really subjective. If you choose Line handshaking, the Braille Lite reads you text from your PC a line at a time, pausing at each carriage return. In fact, the computer will not send more text until the Braille Lite has read to you the present line of text. In many cases, you'll find it desirable to have the Braille Lite read this way - when you're programming, for example, or reading through a list. Choosing Block handshaking, on the other hand, means that the Braille Lite reads you blocks of text up to 256 characters at a time. It doesn't look for carriage returns as it reads to you. Using this choice creates a smoother, more natural sounding speech from the Braille Lite, with more natural pauses and inflections, rather than pauses controlled by the physical ends of lines on the screen. You'll probably find this a more useful choice for reading through a document where it is not important that you know precisely where one line ends and the next begins. Another interesting feature of speech box mode is "indexing". This capability only works if the screen access program you're using supports indexing. Indexing means that the Braille Lite is so closely linked to the PC cursor as it's reading that, if you issue a "stop reading" command on your PC, the PC cursor and the Braille Lite will both stop at the same place. In other words, the last word uttered by the Braille Lite is the same word as where your PC cursor rests. This can be very handy when you're editing, for example, using a word processor in your PC. If your screen access program has the capability to change speech parameters - rate of speech, volume, and so forth - you can change how the Braille Lite reads to you from your PC keyboard. Here is a brief list of the speech parameters you might be able to control from your PC if your screen access program lets you do it: - Volume - Control e x v, where x represents a volume from 01 to 16, 01 being the lowest volume. - Pitch - Control e x p, where x represents a pitch from 01 to 63, 01 being the lowest pitch. - Speech rate - Control e x e, where x represents a rate from 01 to 16, 01 being the slowest speech rate. - Frequency - Control e x t, where x represents a tone from 01 to 25, 01 being the lowest. - Punctuation level - Control e followed by a, m, s, or z, where the letters represent All, Most, Some, or No punctuation, respectively. - Index marker - Control f. - Silence command - Control x. If you're working specifically with Blazie Engineering's screen access program (PC Master), you should enter speech box mode in a special way to insure that all the telecommunications settings are set properly. Bring up the Speech Parameters menu with an ar-sign-chord. Then press a p- chord. YOu'll hear, "Speech box on, exit". You're now ready to interact with PC Master. Some Status menu settings are changed to make PC Master and your Braille Lite communicate better. When you exit speech box mode, it'll be important to do so by the same method you entered it. In other words, press an ar-sign-chord and p-chord. Exiting speech box mode in some other way may cause problems because the settings changed in the Status menu won't revert to what they were before you entered speech box mode to work with PC Master. The Braille Lite's ability to perform as a portable speech synthesizer can come in handy if you have to interact with many computers or are on the road a lot and can't take extra equipment with you, or you can't take a PC apart to install an internal speech synthesizer. Now, we're going to look at going in the opposite direction. * 15.7 Sending Braille Lite Ouput to Your Computer Screen You can have what you write in your Braille Lite be displayed directly directly on your computer screen. That screen may be your PC screen or it may be a Braille 'n Speak, or another Braille Lite. To turn your Braille Lite into a remote device, all the usual telecommunications settings previously described must match up and cable requirements must be met. Press a 0-chord (dots 3-5-6-chord) on the Braille Lite. It says, "Remote". Write a dot 4 to send output directly to a computer screen. You'll hear, "ASCII". To turn off remote mode, turn off the Braille Lite. SUMMARY We have certainly come a long way in this section. We suggest you review the steps outlined in those sections that meet your needs and not dwell on those that don't. Telecommunications can be wonderful, but the staggering array of possibilities can daunt even the heartiest among us. Take your time learning about telecommunications and use Appendix A, Troubleshooting, to help you when you get confused. Usually, telecommunications challenges arise from simply forgetting a step in the process. Once you've mastered the process though, you'll definitely reap its rewards. * CHAPTER 16: RUNNING EXTERNAL PROGRAMS In Section 14.5, we saw how to load programs into your Braille Lite to add even more flexibility to the machine. We showed you an example of such a program when we demonstrated how to load the financial calculator from our portable disk drive. You could just as easily load a program into your Braille Lite from your PC or from a bulletin board using a modem. In fact, we at Blazie Engineering maintain a bulletin board (see your Help file for its number) not only so that we can share Blazie news with you, but also to provide you with another way to download programs that run on your Braille Lite. External programs for the Braille Lite must have extensions of .bin, .bns, .com, .dic, .exe, or .sys. You can review the details about how to load them into your Braille Lite by reading over Section 14.5. Unfortunately, for lack of space, we've had to limit our exploration to just four external programs in what is already a mammoth manual: the Checkbook Writer, the Macro Editor, the Easy Braille Translator, and Teach Braille. But the good news is, better and more exciting programs are being introduced all the time for the Braille Lite. We hope the four we've highlighted whet your appetite enough to try them out. And who knows, maybe you'll write one yourself to add to our ever-growing arsenal. A few notes before we start learning about the first program: From the Files menu, point directly to an external program by pressing dot 2- chord to move to the previous one in your files list, or pressing dot 5-chord to move to the next one in your files list. For information about an external program to which you're pointing, press a th-sign-chord (dots 1-4-5-6-chord). After hearing a brief description of the program, you'll be back at the Files menu prompt, "Enter file command." To load an external program, press an x-chord. If the program can accept arguments (we'll get into what that means later), write an x instead of an x- chord. Enter arguments in computer braille, separated by commas, and then press an e-chord to load the program with your arguments. These are all the things you need to know to get started. 16.1 The Checkbook Writer Probably one of the most frustrating experiences a visually-impaired person encounters in the course of handling private affairs is the inability to write and track personal checks. Most of us can remember, or still use, a slate and stylus or braillewriter and a cumbersome notebook with our personal checkbook register in some hieroglyphics of our own. That is, those of us diligent enough to do that or comfortable enough with braille to deal with such a setup. On the other hand, many of us just rely on the word of our trusted reader who helps us with mail anyway, or a relative, or (riskiest of all), our "excellent" memory? Help is here! The checkbook writer comes in two program files on the disk that you got with your Braille Lite: "demochek.bns" and "demostat.bns". You may also see a couple of files that begin with "chek" and end with a .doc extension. These ASCII textfiles provide a rough overview of how the checkbook demo works. We'll try to flesh out that documentation in our present discussion. "chekbook.bns" handles all the menu options available in the program. "chekstat.bns" generates statements. On your disk are demo versions of these files: namely, "democheck.bns" and "demostat.bns". The demo version of the program lets you set up only one account file and that filename must be "check.sys". The file can only have 10 entries and the word "*demo*" is automatically included in the "pay to" field. Since the programs you have are demonstration programs, call Blazie for information on how to obtain a registered copy after you've tried out the demo version of the program. 16.1.1 Start-Up Messages When you first run the checkbook program, you hear a copyright statement, followed by your name (if you have a registered copy of the program), and finally the program's version number. Then you hear the prompt, "Ready". At this point, you can either continue with the program, or quit. 16.1.2 Entering the Account Filename The checkbook program must have an account file in order to function properly. You're prompted to enter the filename of your account file. The file must have an "sys" extension. If you don't specify one, an "sys" extension is tacked onto the filename. If the file doesn't exist, it is created and you hear a confirmation message that it was created. If you don't have enough room in your Braille Lite for the account file to be created, you hear an error message and the checkbook program aborts altogether. When an account file is first created, you are prompted to enter the account type, account number, bank name and beginning balance. The entries are confirmed as you enter them before they are actually stored into the file. However, if the program had already created an account file for you, this information, along with an ending balance, is spoken to you. In the demo version, you can only have the one account file, "check.sys", as we mentioned above. But if you have the registered version of the checkbook program, and you decide that the account file you opened is not the one you want to work with, use the menu to get another account file or to quit the program. 16.1.3 Menu Options At the novice help level, you're prompted, "List menu options? Enter y or n." If you answer with a y, the menu options are repeated. If you answer with an n, the program assumes you're familiar with the menu and waits for you to enter a choice with a particular letter or number. At the expert help level, you proceed directly to entering a menu choice. Should you forget one though, and need to hear the menu after all, write a question mark. We'll go through the menu options one at a time. But first, here are a few tips. After you write a response to a prompt, press an e-chord to enter it. Single- character responses don't require an e-chord. You must include decimal portions of any amounts you enter - for example, 25.00 or 123.45. You enter dates in the format mmddyy - for example, 010195 for January 1, 1995. Whenever you enter data, you must confirm the entry before it can be stored into your file. Pressing an e-chord by itself at a prompt for data creates a blank entry. But you can re-enter any data that is invalid. Finally, a z- chord from within any field returns you to the menu. c - checks Use this option to enter and print checks, and to test or change the print parameters. To enter checks, the program prompts you for "pay to", amount, memo information, and tax item. A check number is assigned when the check is entered. You can use the number generated by the program or enter a check number yourself. Duplicate check numbers are not allowed. You can print checks as you write them or print them later. If you choose to print checks later, the checkbook register is scanned for unprinted checks. At the time you want to print, you're asked to verify that the unprinted check found is the one you want to print. If it's not, you can continue searching until you find the one you want to print. Once the check is printed, you're asked if the check was printed properly. If it wasn't, you can void it. Then you can re-enter the check (with a new check number that is assigned to it), and then finally, reprint the check. Although most checks have the same format in terms of where items go on which lines, your printer may line up differently with the physical lines on your checks than what we've set. A test pattern can be printed to help you figure out the field positions. You may need sighted help setting things up. But once print positions are established, you should be able to handle printing checks on your own. When you're prompted to change a print parameter for an item on your check, you're also told its current setting so that you can decide whether to adjust the setting. You must confirm each new value to store it. You may choose to store the new values or keep the default values of the program. You can also print a sample check to test alignment. DEFAULT PRINT PARAMETERS: check number - row 2, column 50 (not printed); date - row 5, column 50; pay to - row 8, column 10; amount - row 8, column 60; amount words - row 10, column 5; pay for - row 15, column 10; rows to top of next check - 10. d - deposit The program prompts you for description, amount, and memo. m - miscellaneous fees The program prompts you for description, amount, memo, and tax item. w - ATM withdrawal The program prompts you for description, amount, memo, and tax item. i - interest The program prompts you for description, amount, and memo. v - void check The program prompts you for the check number to be voided. b - balance The account's ending balance is spoken. If the account is overdrawn, you are warned. s - statement The program will generate a statement for an account (or multiple accounts) for a time period you request. The statement can be spoken, printed, or saved to a file. If you print the statement to a file, the "txt" extension is used. The statement lists the account information as well as the statement period and the date the statement is generated. In addition, it lists all entries for deposits, checks, fees, ATM withdrawals, and interest, as well as a summary with the beginning balance, total deposits, total checks, total fees, total ATM withdrawals, total interest and ending balance. If you want a statement for multiple accounts, you're prompted for each account filename. A summary of all accounts will also be included. The statement begins with the account file you're currently using. Even if multiple account files are included in the statement, the current account file remains open when the statement is finished speaking or printing. a - adjust date The program uses the current date in your Braille Lite as today's date. But it can use any date from 01-01-1971 through 12-31-2070. If the date is valid, the program repeats the date you want to use. g - get account filename As we mentioned above, the registered copy of the checkbook program can handle multiple account files, but it can access only one account file at a time. You're prompted to enter the filename (which must have a "sys" extension). One account file must be successfully opened or created for the checkbook program to run. k - change Grade 2 You can select computer braille or Grade 2 for entering data. The account file is marked accordingly for computer braille or Grade 2 and will expect the appropriate input from you until you change it. The default setting is computer braille. r - review or edit entries You can review the various types of entries in your account file: voided checks, printed checks, fees, etc. You're prompted for the specific entry you want to review, and for a starting date so that you can review entries beginning with that date. Entries can also be reviewed and/or edited by check number, date or account information. You're prompted for editing each item. Then you can reconcile them with your bank's statement. Navigating Entries To move from entry to entry, write a p for the entry prior to the current one. Write an n for the entry following the current one. Write an o to hear the current entry again. Write an f to hear the first entry in your checkbook. Navigating through fields in an entry When you're scanning the fields within an entry, write a 1 to get to the previous field in the entry. If you're already on the entry's first field, then writing a 1 brings you back to the last field of the previous entry. To hear the current field of the entry you're scanning repeated, write a 2. If you want to hear the next field in the entry you're currently scanning spoken, write a 3. If you're already on the entry's last field, then writing a 3 brings you to the first field of the next entry in your checkbook. A quick example might help distinguish between entries and fields. By entry, we mean all the data related to a particular transaction - for example, a deposit. By field, we mean each component of a transaction - for example, the date, the amount, the memo, etc. So, moving from entry to entry involves the letters n, o, and p, while moving within the fields of an entry involves the numbers 1, 2, and 3. e - erase checkbook entries When you want to make the account file smaller, we suggest you save the account file to disk as a backup, just in case something goes wrong. To save your account file before erasing entries, you're asked if you have saved your account file to disk. If you answer y for yes, the program asks if you want to save your account information to a file. If you answer y, you're asked for a filename. Enter the filename (without an extension), followed by an e-chord. A "sav" extension is appended to the filename you specify. Whenever you use this backup option to save account information to a file, the new information does not replace the old information in the file. Rather, it gets appended to the file. For example, let's say you save your account information to a file called "chek.sav". Whenever you back up information to that file again, the program appends the new information to the old "chek.sav" file, rather than replacing the old "check.sav" file. You can erase checkbook entries from the beginning of an account file, but you must erase them consecutively for accounting accuracy. You can also review entries individually and then erase them. As a safety feature, the program makes you confirm that you want to erase entries. In addition, you can erase a group of entries by providing a date. All entries before that date are erased, but you still have to confirm that you want them erased. When all the entries before the date you specify are erased, a message confirms that they're gone. h - help level Two levels of help are available. The novice level prompts you to list menu options before each menu choice. The expert level lets you proceed directly to the next menu choice. The default setting for the help level is novice. You can also get help by writing a question mark if you need the menu repeated. u - printer type Since the Braille Lite has both a serial port and a parallel port, you must select which port you want to be marked for printing your account files and your checks. An account file is normally marked for a serial port, but you can change it to parallel. t - current time The checkbook program recognizes the Braille Lite's current time. q - quit Use this option to exit the checkbook program. x - rename account file You can rename an account file, even the one you're currently using. You're prompted for the file you want to rename. Enter the file's current name, followed by an e-chord. Then enter the new filename, followed by an e-chord. # - Switch between digits and full number announcement To hear digits spoken, write a number sign (dots 3-4-5-6), followed by a d. To hear full numbers spoken as words, write the number sign, followed by an n. Or, write a q to return to the main menu. 16.1.4 Generating a Statement To generate a statement, you must exit "checkbook" and run the "checkstat" program. Choose l from the main menu to see a list of entry types. For example, you may see a list like, miscellaneous fees, deposits, checks, etc. If you want a statement of just your miscellaneous fees, for instance, write the letter m. The program asks you for starting and ending dates. Then you can save the list to a file, print it or just have it speak. We think you'll wonder how you managed without the handy checkbook writer once you've mastered its use. What may have seemed like a privilege at one time - the ability to keep track of and write your own checks - will become a right you won't want ever to relinquish again. Now to satisfy the hackers among you, let's get into something a bit more technical - tinkering with macros. 16.2 Editing Macros If you've played around with the Braille Lite's macro capability, you know how nice it can be not to have to perform tedious keystroke sequences by hand. But what happens if you want to change just one command within a macro, or if you want to refresh your memory on what commands a macro performs. Some of us have gotten so dependent on our macros that we've lost track of just how it is that they do what they do for us. Well, in all fairness, you may have gotten a macro that someone else put together for you into your Braille Lite. While running the macro may be a breeze, when the time comes to discover how it does what it does, you're stuck. The Braille Lite hasn't let you peek at the contents of the "macro.sys" file. At least, not up to now. The macro editor, called "macedit.bns", that comes on the disk you got with your Braille Lite can read, list, create, and edit macros in the "macros.sys" file. As with the checkbook writer, we won't describe how to load the program into your Braille Lite. Check out Section 14.5 for those details. Here, we'll just talk about running the program. When you start the program from the Files menu with an x-chord, it looks for the "macros.sys" file. But if you want, you can start the program by including a different filename as an "argument". (An argument in this context has little to do with quarreling. It's a piece of information you provide to a program as you load it - for example, the name of the file on which you want it to work.) From the Files menu, point to the program; but write an x, instead of an x- chord, to run it. The Braille Lite says, "Enter arguments". Write the name of the file that contains the macros you want to edit and press and e-chord The macro editor then loads that file and lets you look around. If you provide an invalid filename, the program creates an empty file with no macros in it for you to see. However, if it can't create a file because you don't have enough room in your Braille Lite, you hear an error message and the program kicks you back to the Files menu at the "Enter file command" prompt. When you run the program, you hear a brief introductory message. Then you hear the number of defined macros, or key definitions, the program found, and finally, you're prompted for a command. The program accepts only single letter commands. You don't need to press e- chords. When you first start up the macro editor, it sets punctuation to most so you can hear all characters the program reads. However, your Braille Lite reverts to whatever punctuation mode was previously set when you exit the program. If you turn off your Braille Lite while the program is still running, however, the punctuation mode you had previously set before entering the macro editor is lost and your Braille Lite retains the punctuation mode set in the macro editor. Your menu options are fairly pneumonic - that is, you can remember most of them by the first letter of each command. Now let's go through your choices. 16.2.1 Command Mode A - Announces the current version of the software. B - Briefly lists all the keys assigned to the macros that are defined in the currently open macros file. This is just a list of the keys assigned to the macros, without definitions of what each key does. C - Clears all key definitions of all macros and resets the entire macro buffer to 0. Since this could be disastrous, the program makes you confirm that you really want to clear all macros. D - Duplicates a key definition. For example, if macro 'a' performs something you want macro 'f' to do also, but you want macro 'f' to do other things too, you may duplicate macro 'a' to 'f', then edit the definition of macro 'f'. When you select the d option from the Novice help level, the program asks you to confirm whether you really want to duplicate one macro to another. If you say yes, the key definition is copied. E - Erase an individual key definition. The program asks you what key definition to erase. At the Novice help level, it asks you to confirm whether you really want to erase the macro. F - Speaks the name of the currently open macro file. G - Gets a different macro file from the Braille Lite. If you haven't saved any changes you've made to the currently open macro file, the program asks you to confirm that you want to leave the current macro file without saving your changes before getting a different macro file for you to edit. H - Sets the help level for the program. If the help level is set to novice, all prompts are spoken. But if the level is set to expert, only essential ones are spoken. Select e for expert mode or n for novice mode. The program remembers at what help level you last set it. However, if you remove the macro editor from your Braille Lite and then reload it from disk, the Novice level will be in effect once again. I - Import key definitions contained in another macro file. Say you have a friend who has some really nice Braille Lite macros. You copy that file onto disk, making sure it has a different name than yours so that when you load it into the Braille Lite it doesn't overwrite your own macros. After loading the new macro file into your Braille Lite, run the macro editor and write an I. The program asks you for the filename from which it should read key definitions. Enter the filename of your new macro file. The program knows that there may be key assignments in the new file identical to ones you already have in your currently open macro file. Be careful. You may wipe out a key definition you took a lot of time to put together. If you answer yes, the program will overwrite any macros in your currently open file with those from the new macro file that have the same names. If you say no, the program prompts you for each key definition it finds. L - List your macro key definitions in an ASCII file. The program prompts you for the name of the file you want to contain the list. If you write the name of an existing file, the program moves that file to the end of your files list and appends the new macro definitions to it. If there's not enough room in your Braille Lite for the new, expanded file, you hear an error message. Otherwise, you hear, "okay" and the program returns you to its command prompt. M - Makes a copy of the "macros.sys" file in your Braille Lite. You're prompted for a filename. When you provide one, the program copies the "macros.sys" file into that file. This is a good way to keep a backup of your macros file. You may want to copy that backup onto disk for safekeeping. P - Prints a list of the defined macros to the serial port on the Braille Lite. The program prompts you to, "Turn on device", and then press a key to begin printing. You can abort the process at this point with a z-chord. Your printout will appear in the same format as that of the ASCII textfile you can create with the L command. Q - Quits the program. Any changes you've made to the macros are saved to the "macros.sys" file. S - Shows you the contents of a key definition. U - Updates the currently open macro file with your changes. V - View/edit. From here, the program asks you what key definition you want to see. You may press any letter or symbol. Press any chord to abort the editing process. When you select a key definition to view, the program reads it to you. But if it can't find the key definition, it tells you that the key definition you selected is undefined. In that case, the program asks if you want to see the current key definition. If you say yes, you're placed into the macro editor. See the next section for details on how to use the editor. W - Write the currently open macro file with its key definitions to a new macro file. X - Exit the macro editor without saving. If you've modified any macros, the program warns you in case you want to change your mind about exiting without saving your changes. (By the way, pressing a z-chord has the same effect as the X command.) # - Tells you how many macros are in your macro file. % - Shows you a key definition. Use dots 1-4-6 (the computer braille percent sign). This option works like the s command. The program asks you what key definition you want to see. If you write a key definition the program can't find, it tells you that key is undefined and returns you to the Command prompt. 16.2.2 Editing a Key Definition Once you've invoked the V command to view/edit a macro, and once you've selected a key definition to see, use the character-by-character chords (dot 3-chord and dot 6-chord) to move back and forth through the key definition. The Braille Lite Insert command (i-chord) works as usual. Just as with writing in any other Braille Lite file, any characters you enter or chords you press that create characters (like a hard carriage return, dots 4-6-chord) are appended to the end of the key definition. Press an r-chord (just as you do to see how much room is left in any Braille Lite file) to see how much room you have to add characters to the current key definition. Just as with regular Braille Lite files, a wh-sign-chord (dots 1-5-6-chord) tells you where the cursor is in the current key definition. If you press a d-chord, the character under the cursor is deleted. Be careful, though, if you delete the last character in the key definition. Remember that the cursor, of course, moves back one place to what is now the last character of the key definition. If you press a }-chord (dots 1-2-4-5-6-chord) or a k-chord, the program asks if you want to remove the entire key definition. If you answer yes, the macro buffer is emptied and you may then continue editing. Press an M-chord to set a mark. Then you can copy to the Clipboard all text from the mark to where your cursor is resting, as usual, with a gh-sign-chord (dots 1-2-6-chord). When you press a p-chord, the contents of the Clipboard is pasted into the current key definition. To include a chord command as part of a key definition, press a ch-sign-chord (dots 1-6-chord). Follow it with any of the Braille Lite chord commands, e for example, for e-chord. When you're finished editing the current key definition, press an e-chord to exit the editing mode of the macro editor and return to the command mode. A z-chord kicks you back to Command mode, too, but without saving any changes you may have made to the key definition. As you can see, the macro editor can be very helpful in a variety of ways. However, we strongly recommend backing up your macro file - the "macros.sys" file - before you attempt messing around with its contents. Once you've mastered this utility, you may even decide to write a few macros for distribution yourself. The next external program we have chosen to discuss is the Easy Braille Translator. We turn to that now. 16.3 The Easy Braille Translator The Easy Braille Translator converts Grade 2 braille text to and from standard ASCII textfiles. The demonstration version of the program is on the disk you got with your Braille Lite. Call Blazie Engineering to find out about purchasing a registered copy. The Easy Braille Translator comes in two files: "ebtbns.bns" and "ebtbns.asc". As with other external programs, you need to load into your Braille Lite the file with the "bns" extension. The other file is simply the program's documentation. From the Files menu, point to the program and run it by pressing an x-chord. Whenever you run it, the program speaks a brief introductory message. Then it prompts you for the name of the file you want to translate (the input file), and for the name you want the translated file to have (the output file). Press an e-chord to enter your input and output filenames. If you assign a name to the translated file that already exists, the program says, "Press Append, Overwrite, or Cancel." Respond with an a to append the text that is now being translated to the end of the existing file. So, for example, let's say you have a file called "address" - like the one we created back in Chapter 4 - with names and addresses and phone numbers, all in Grade 2 braille. Then you get a file of additional names and addresses you want to add to this file, but the text is not in Grade 2 braille because a coworker typed it up on the computer. Load the file into your Braille Lite and give the Easy Braille Translator its name as the file you want to translate. Then give the program the name of your "address" file as the file to receive the translated text. The new names and addresses will be added to your old ones. But be careful with the Append option. You wouldn't want to end up with a mixed bag of both computer braille and Grade 2 braille in the same file. You can also choose to overwrite an existing file on your Braille Lite with the text now being translated. To do this, write an o at the prompt. Again, be careful that you don't overwrite a file that had important data. Cancel the program by writing a c at the prompt. At that point, you'll be back in the Braille Lite's Files menu. A z-chord aborts the translation process but does not kick you out of the program. In case you have your Braille Lite connected to a braille embosser, you can also write "prn" or "ser" at the "Press Append, Overwrite, or Cancel" prompt. The translated text then goes directly to the embosser through your Braille Lite's serial port. The translator uses the telecommunications settings you have in place. So it's a good idea to check them out through the Status menu before you try translating a file directly to an embosser. 16.3.1 Some Tips on Running the Translator With each line of text it translates, the translator clicks. Toggle this progress marker on and off by writing a q. If you press the spacebar while the translator is working, it reports its progress. The program can name your output file for you. If you just press an e-chord at the prompt for an output filename without writing a name for the file, the program automatically assigns the output file the same name as that of your input file, except that it adds the extension ".brl". So, for example, if you let the program do the naming of your output files, input files with no extensions (like "games") translate into output files with the "brl" extension ("games.brl"), and input files that already have a "brl" extension ("homework.brl") translate into output files with "txt" extensions ("homework.txt"). We do suggest you name output files with the .brl extension even when you name them yourself. It's an easy way to tell which files are braille (Grade 2) files and which are not as you're roaming around your Braille Lite's files list. 16.3.2 Menu Options There are some default settings you may want to change before running the translator. When you hear the prompt for the input filename, bring up the translator's main menu by pressing an o-chord. Likewise, you can bring up this same main menu by pressing an o-chord when you hear the prompt for the output filename. The first time the main menu appears, you hear a lengthy message listing all of the available options. You can hear this list again by pressing a th-sign- chord. A - Announces information about the program and where to obtain updates. F - Resets the translator to its default settings. Each parameter is described and its default setting is stated. H - Help. You can toggle between Novice and Expert mode. While the program is in Novice mode, all prompts are spoken in detail. While in Expert mode, however, prompts are cryptic. Even if you choose Expert mode, though, you can always press a th-sign-chord at any prompt to get help. L - Load a previously saved configuration. The program asks you for the number of the configuration you want to load. Valid configuration numbers range from 1 to 4; the numbers must be entered in computer braille. For more information on configurations, see the S option. S - Save the current configuration (program settings) into a special memory area from where they can be retrieved for later use. The program asks you to enter a number from 1 to 4 where you want to store the configuration. Write a single digit without an e-chord. The program then waits for you to write in a description for the configuration. Complete your description with an e-chord. T - Translator parameters. This option brings up a Status menu that contains many of the default settings of the translator, and that lets you change them as you move around the menu. See Section 16.3.3 for details. Q - Quit to the input or output file prompt at exactly the same point you left it. If you had started to write the name of an input or output file when you decided to press an o-chord to bring up the main menu, writing a q returns you to the exact place where you had left off in that process. V - Verify version of the translator. You'll hear the version number, revision level, and creation date. This information can help a lot when you're calling Technical Support. Note: Still within the translator's main menu, if you write 1, 2, 3, or 4 (in computer braille, of course), the program reads you the appropriate configuration description. If a configuration doesn't exist for the number you choose, you hear an error message. On the other hand, if you write a number between 1 and 4 as a chord, if a configuration exists for that number, it's loaded into memory for you. Be careful if you do this before saving a current configuration. The new one replaces any configuration settings you may have had in memory. And, if you write a number chord to which you haven't assigned a configuration, the factory defaults are loaded into memory, replacing whatever settings you may have had. 16.3.3 Translation Parameters Once you've chosen the T option from the translator's main menu, you can navigate through the Translation Parameters menu with the typical dot 1- and dot 4-chords to move backward and forward, l-chord and dots 4-5-6-chord to move to the first and last options, and c-chord to repeat the current option. If a setting needs a numeric response, simply write the appropriate number once you're on the setting, followed by an e-chord. If a setting needs a yes/no or on/off response, write a y or n, followed by an e-chord. (Doesn't this sound a bit like working through the Braille Lite's own Status menu?) Now let's check out the possible settings in this Translation Parameters menu. Translation Direction Default is Grade 2 braille. The first choice on the menu, Translation Direction can be set to "Grade 2", "Grade 1", and "Reverse". Select the translation process you want by writing a 2, 1, or r. Grade 2 braille is, of course, fully contracted braille. Grade 1 braille uses the braille punctuation and numbering conventions but does not contract words. Reverse back-translates from Grade 1 or 2 braille into print (a job the Braille Lite itself can also do for you, if you prefer.) A note of caution: If you do choose Reverse, make sure the file you want to translate into print is really a Grade 1 or Grade 2 braille file. You'll be stunned at the resulting gibberish your printer will produce if you back- translate and print a file that was already in computer braille. Maximum Number of Contiguous Blank Spaces Default is 1. This setting limits how many blank spaces the output file will contain in a row. If you set the number to 0, all the spaces in the input file are brought along into the output file. It can be a significant drawback to have the number of spaces a braille output file receives from an ASCII textfile set to 0. Here's why. An ASCII textfile generally prints out just fine to a printer. All the text seems to be centered, tabbed, and any other formatting considerations appear to be in effect. But what's really going on is that the printer is counting out however many blank spaces it needs to center or tab the text. If a line of text is indented 5 spaces from the left margin, for example, and the left margin is 10 spaces from the edge of the paper, the printer really counts out 15 spaces before it starts printing the text. Imagine what would happen to a file you had translated into braille with the "space filter" set to 0. You'd get the 15 spaces in your braille file and your braille embosser would happily reproduce those 15 spaces as it brailles out the file for you. So, unless you have a pressing need to see exactly how many spaces your ASCII file has in a row, leave this setting at its default of 1. Maximum Number of Contiguous Blank Lines Default is 1. Like the setting just described, and for the same reasons, you probably want to keep this one set to 1, as well. Bracket Translation ON/OFF When this option is set to "on", the '[', '{', '}', ']', '(', and ')' characters are all translated into the Grade 2 braille parenthesis character (dots 2-3-5-6). When set to "off", the '(' and ')' characters are translated, and all the others are inserted into the output text with the 'do not translate' symbol before them. Strip Carriage Returns From Source Text ON/OFF Any carriage returns found in the middle of what the translator thinks is a paragraph are removed to let the Braille Lite's own formatting system produce properly formatted braille output. CR Strip Left Zone and CR Strip Right Zone These two settings help determine where carriage returns will be allowed in the output file. Both zones count out how many characters there are in the current "line" from the last carriage return encountered. The left zone looks at how short a line is from the last carriage return found. The right zone looks at how long it is. In other words, if the translator sees that a line contains fewer characters than a certain number (that you can set), it brings the carriage return along into the output file because it assumes that the end of a paragraph has been reached. On the other hand, if the translator sees a very long line (longer than a certain number that you can set), it strips out that carriage return because it assumes that the "line" is really just one paragraph. One reason this issue exists at all is that many people still treat the computer like a typewriter and place carriage returns on every line they type, rather than letting the computer wordwrap for them and placing carriage returns only in between paragraphs and other blocks of text. Also, some word processors, when converting files to ASCII textfiles, place carriage return/linefeed pairs (or at least carriage returns) on every line. What constitutes a "line" can vary widely, depending on the print font, point size, and pitch of the print characters. So for our purposes, let's take a brief example of an ASCII textfile with a page width of 65 (assigned by some text editor or word processor). You'd tell your Easy Braille Translator to set the left zone to a number less than 65 and the right zone to a number greater than 65. So when the translator sees a short line, it will bring the carriage return along to the output file, but when it sees a long line, it will strip out the carriage return and just generate a space in the output file. As a result, your output file will probably braille out properly. Place Letter Signs Before Single Character Words ON/OFF When this setting is turned "on", a braille letter indicator (dots 5-6) is placed before any single letters, except 'i' and 'a'. Mostly, you'll want this setting turned "off", as there are many single-letter, Grade 2 braille contractions. Click During Translation ON/OFF When this setting is "on", you hear clicks as the translator processes each line. Writing a q again while the translator is processing, silences the progress clicks. Word Exceptions The translator can handle up to 192 nonstandard braille rules you may want to use for acronyms or abbreviations. Create a file called "ebt.xpt" in your Braille Lite with braille translation turned off, and place the definitions into it. When the Word Exceptions setting is "on", the translator checks the word exceptions file for any nonstandard rules you may want to use in the translation process for a particular output file. Don't confuse the Word Exceptions setting for your Easy Braille Translator with the Braille Lite's Word Exception dictionary. They are entirely separate concepts, with different word exception files, and with no relation to each other. Having Word Exceptions "on" from your Braille Lite Status menu has no effect whatsoever on the Easy Braille Translator's handling of words. And vice versa. There are two types of word exceptions you can create: To create a nonstandard braille abbreviation (or contraction) for yourself, write the word to be contracted, without any spaces, followed by an equals sign, followed by an apostrophe, and then your contraction. Make sure there are no spaces between the apostrophe and the definition, and end the definition with a carriage return (dots 4-6-chord). For example, to turn "telecommunications" into "tlc", you'd write, "telecommunications='tlc (return)". Our extra notation is only for readability, of course. Now, if you want to go the other way, and turn "blt" into Braille Lite" in your output file, you'd write "blt='Braille Lite (return)". Play around with different kinds of ASCII textfiles to master the various quirks that can develop with any braille translation process. Try straight prose, then a recipe, then a table or chart, etc. We promise that you'll find some challenges along the way. No braille translator is perfect, and no programmer can possibly hope to take into account every conceivable print format you may want to translate into braille. Nevertheless, we feel the Easy Braille Translator does an excellent job. 16.4 Teach Braille Not everyone who purchases a Braille Lite is familiar with all the contractions available in Grade 2 braille. And, if you're a teacher of braille, you may want to consider using the Braille Lite as a teaching tool. Either way, we at Blazie Engineering have a program to help you. If you're a student, our TeachBraille program gives you words to spell in Grade 2 braille, then checks out how you've written them and tells you how to write them correctly if you've made a Grade 2 braille error. If you're a braille teacher, the Teach Braille program lets you create your own lessons for learning braille. The program, called "teachbrl.bns", along with lesson files already created for your use, comes on the disk you got with your Braille Lite. The lesson files all have names like, "less01", "less02", and so on. Load the "teachbrl.bns" program into your Braille Lite along with its lesson files. They are short and won't take up much room, as you'll see. From the Files menu, point to the program and run it by pressing an x-chord. The Braille Lite first asks for a lesson number. Write a two-digit response (in dropped number notation, of course). Or press a z-chord to abort the program at this point. Or, point to the program and write an x followed by the name of the particular lesson you want to try. Then press an e-chord to run the program with that lesson loaded. If you write the number of a lesson that is not loaded into your Braille Lite, the program gives you more chances to bring up a lesson that is on your machine. The program can give you the words in the lesson randomly or sequentially as they appear in the lesson. You can choose either method. If you choose the sequential method, each word in the lesson is spoken to you, and you're given an opportunity to write it so that your Grade 2 braille can be checked by TeachBraille. If you choose the random method, words in the lesson are presented to you in a random order, but the program lets you try each word once before it offers it to you again. If you need to hear it repeated, again, press a 2-5-chord - once to hear the word again, or twice to hear it spelled. When you write a word to be checked, write the Braille character(s) for the word and press an e-chord. If you make a mistake, press b-chords to backspace over it and correct it before you press an e-chord for TeachBraille to check out what you wrote. If you backspace past the beginning of the word you were trying to write, the program lets you know. If you forget where you are in the process of writing a word, press a c-chord to hear the characters you've entered so far. But if you just get exasperated with yourself and want to start your entry over again, press a p-chord and TeachBraille will repeat the word it had asked you to spell. When you write a correct response to a word the program asked you to spell, it presents you with another word to spell. But if you write an incorrect response, TeachBraille gives you the correct answer and lets you try to write the word again. You can listen to the correct answer again by pressing an r- chord at this point. Also, you can alternate between hearing the word as Grade 2 contractions or as dot patterns by pressing a d-chord. You can continue practicing in a lesson as long as you want. The program stops only when you press a z-chord. At that point, you'll be back in the Braille Lite's Files menu. If you're a braille teacher, you can prepare up to 150 lessons of your own. It's important to create them with an ASCII textfile editor or with a word processor that lets you convert your files into ASCII textfiles. If you prepare a lesson file using the Braille Lite, make sure you write in computer braille and have translation turned off for the file. You must follow some special rules in preparing lesson files. Each word and its correct response must appear on a separate line, and a line must not exceed 80 characters. End each line with a carriage return. Write the Grade 2 form of the word first, then write at least one space, and finally the word spelled out in normal ASCII characters. So, for example, a lesson file might look like this (the word "return" in parentheses is merely for emphasis): ! the (return) & and (return) "! there (return) h& hand (return) It's important to name your lesson files with a "less" followed by a number. So our sample lesson file above could be called "less01". If you're creating a lesson with words that sound alike but are spelled differently - too and two, blew and blue, for example - write a + after the word so that TeachBraille spells as well as speaks the word when it offers it to your student. That's it. TeachBraille is a pretty easy tool to manipulate. Whether you're just learning about Grade 2 braille, or are a braille teacher, this program can be very helpful to speeding up your progress with the Braille Lite so you can start using all those fancy features we've discussed throughout this manual. We welcome your comments and suggestions for enhancing TeachBraille to make it even better. SUMMARY CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'VE DON IT! You've worked your way through this mammoth manual. We really tried hard to trim the fat; but we also made sure not to discard any of the real meat. By now, you really know your Braille Lite, don't you? Well, just in case you run into a snag, ahead are four appendices to help you - especially, Appendix A, where we answer most of the questions we usually get. Nevertheless, always remember, we're here if you need our personal touch. APPENDIX A: TROUBLESHOOTING By now, you are no doubt comfortable with the general operations of your Braille Lite. However, what if something goes wrong? So often, manuals tell you how to do things but not how to fix them. What if you hit the wrong key during a procedure? What if you issue a command, then need to cancel it before it finishes doing something? What if, horror of horrors, your file disappears? And finally, what if any of these things happens at three in the morning when you really can't reach for the phone to get help? All these "what-if's" are real possibilities whenever you have a computer. It's a simple fact of life. For most of us, though, reaching for the phone, even though it may mean a toll-call, is easier and less scary than trying to deal with the problem ourselves. Our purpose in this appendix is to show you that many potentially devastating problems really aren't, that you just might be able to solve them yourself after all. And think how good you'll feel for having done so. We reached into our files for the most commonly asked questions of the technical support staff and list them here with possible solutions to try before panicking. Of course, we are here if you should really need us. But chances are, when you call, already having tried to solve the problem yourself, we won't have to walk you through the basics and your phone bill will be smaller. We're not trying to discourage you from calling for help and, in fact, we invite your feedback. But we are confident that we can serve you even better if you can first troubleshoot the problem yourself. Incidentally, some solutions suggested below come directly from those of you brave enough to challenge the murky waters of troubleshooting. We commend you for helping all of us. And now, on to the questions: TELECOMMUNICATIONS QUESTIONS 1. How do I connect my Braille Lite to my (brand name) printer, computer, or modem? You must connect the right cables and match telecommunications settings between your Braille Lite and the other device. We offer a wide range of cables which connect the Braille Lite to the most commonly used computers, printers, and modems. For example, there are cables for the PC/XT and PC/AT series of the IBM PC and compatibles, as well as cables for the Apple family of computers and printers. In addition, we offer the serial to parallel converter cable for use with parallel printers, although since your Braille Lite has a parallel cable, you won't need this particular convertor to link your unit to a parallel printer. Refer to Section 13.1 for general information and to Appendix C for technical information about cables. The Braille Lite is preset with the most commonly used telecommunications settings. To see how they are set, check them out from the Status menu. For a full discussion of these settings, see Section 13.2. For a listing of the default settings, refer to Appendix B. 2. I connect my cable to my modem. It fits but I cannot communicate. The cable may fit, but you need a null modem adapter to talk to the modem. 3. I am connected to my modem with a null modem adapter. When I try to communicate, I hear, "Waiting on serial device". Carrier Detect must be changed. It is low and must be made high. Try "at ampersand c1" from a PC, then "at ampersand w" to save the configuration. 4. My Braille Lite cable fits into my PC's serial port, but it will not communicate. If the cable that comes with your Braille Lite fits into your port with no adapters, then you probably have it in the parallel port. Serial ports are usually male, so you'll need a gender adapter. 5. I hear "File is full" and I'm hooked up to a computer, a bulletin board with my modem, or a printer. If you're in a mode of duplex where material is stored and/or echoed back from the other device, and therefore appended to the end of your currently open file, you might run into a "File is full" error message. Turn off the serial port and check the file's contents, deleting any extraneous text. Also, it might help to change the duplex or Echo feature of the device in question. 6. My Braille Lite doesn't speak the last character it receives from the PC or bulletin board to which I'm connected with my modem. You need to set the Interactive Timeout parameter, normally set to 0 (or "off). Set this parameter from the Status menu. Speech devices require specific signals - for example, carriage returns and spaces - in order to speak data they have received from another device. Occasionally, the final signal sent from an external device is not what the Braille Lite needs to see. For these cases, the Braille Lite produces a signal of its own. The interactive timeout parameter sets the amount of time that the Braille Lite waits before generating this signal. Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write an x. You hear something like, "Interactive timeout, 0", which means "off". You can change the length of time the Braille Lite waits before issuing the signal to speak the data it has received from 1 to 255 tenths of a second. So setting it to 10 means that the Braille Lite waits one second before speaking data it has received. PRINTING QUESTIONS 1. When I try to print, my printer won't move to the next line. Add linefeeds is off. If you turn this setting on, a linefeed character is sent to the printer with every line that is printed. See Section 15.1.2. 2. When I try to print, the Braille Lite says, "Waiting on serial device". The printer is probably off-line. Turn the printer on-line. If this does not work, connect a minitester in between the Braille Lite and the printer. (The minitester comes with Blazie's interface kit. Call for more information.) 3. When I try to print, the Braille Lite says, "Okay", but nothing happens. First, check whether the telecommunications settings on both devices match. Check Baud rate, parity, data bits, stop bits, and handshaking. Next, try turning on Add Linefeeds. Some printers need a linefeed character with every line or they'll refuse to cooperate. Next, check the pins in the serial ports of both devices to see if they are bent or broken. 4. When I print either to a PC or printer, I get garbage -mainly x's, p's and at signs. Most likely, Baud rates don't match. Check the Baud rate on both devices. 5. When I print, my document is missing characters. This is probably a handshaking problem. The Braille Lite's handshaking may be different from the printer's. 6. I can't send or receive files from my disk drive and I am properly connected to it. If I press a t-chord, I don't hear the "disk drive" message before the prompt, "Enter s to send or r to receive" and if I press an s-chord from within my file, I hear, "Storage device missing". Check that the disk drive is turned on. If turning it on does not solve the problem, then turn the Braille Lite off and on again. 7. I'm connected to a computer or bulletin board through a modem. But on the Braille Lite, I can't see the text I'm hearing from the other device on the braille display. You probably have serial tracking turned off. If you move your display with the advance bar, you'll see the text from the other device. However, if you'd like the display to move as information comes into your Braille Lite from the other device, turn serial tracking on from the Status menu. Bring up the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and press a t-chord to jump to the setting. Write a y. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. From now on, information coming in from the other device will force the display to zap along too rapidly for you to read the information as it's being transmitted, but you'll know when the other device has stopped sending because your display will stop moving. You'll be at approximately the last eighteen characters worth of information the other device has sent. This setup is good if you're familiar with the menus on a bulletin board, for example, and only need to see the prompt that ends a long display of menu choices. 8. I'm connected to a computer or bulletin board through a modem and have serial tracking turned on so I can see and hear everything that's coming into the Braille Lite. I can tell when the other device has stopped sending because the display stops moving and I see about the last eighteen characters worth of text that's been transmitted. But on my braille display I can't see what I'm typing when I'm responding to a prompt from the computer or bulletin board. You probably have keyboard tracking turned off so that the braille display's cursor (dots 7-8) is not moving as you type. Bring up the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and jump to the setting with a k-chord. Write a y to turn on keyboard tracking. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. From now on, what you type should be displayed as you write it. Since you also have serial tracking on, though, when information comes into your Braille Lite from the other device, your braille display will zap you to approximately the last eighteen characters worth of information sent by the other device. If you don't want this to happen but you still want to see what you're typing as you write, turn serial tracking off. Bring up the Status menu again and press a t-chord to jump to the setting. Write an n and exit the Status menu with an e-chord. Now, you should be able to see what you're writing on the display and read information coming in from the other device by tapping the advance bar. 9. I'm connected to a computer or bulletin board through a modem, but whatever I type is doubled, even though information coming into my Braille Lite is fine. Your telecommunications program and some modems let you turn off the "echoing" of your keystrokes. You're actually not transmitting double characters to the other device. It's just that it thinks you want to see each character it got from you and so "echoes" it back. It'll probably be quicker and easier to turn off echoing from the Braille Lite side than from the PC side of the link. What you want to do is change your duplex to "full". Enter the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and jump to the setting by writing a d. Then write an f to select "full" duplex. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. From now on, what you type should look fine. CRASH AND RECOVERY QUESTIONS 1. All of my files have become gibberish, and when I go into the Files menu, the titles are incorrect. This rarely happens to our newer revisions, but this sounds like a crash. In other words, there may be something wrong with your unit, but it may be fixable. Try a "warm" reset. If that does not work, you must do a "cold" reset, the i-chord. You do a "warm" reset to return all Braille Lite settings to their default values (except for the battery timer) without losing data. When you press a for-sign-chord (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6-chord), the Braille Lite says, "Warm reset, please verify". When you press a second for-sign-chord, it says "Okay". CAUTION: Do not use a warm reset within another command or while data are being transmitted. You can also do a warm reset when you turn on the Braille Lite. To issue the command, turn off the Braille Lite. Then hold down all seven Braille Lite keys as you turn on the power. Once power is on, continue to hold down the keys for about a second. Use the "cold" reset procedure only as a last resort. All settings are reset to their defaults and all files you may have created, as well as their data, might be lost. For about 2 seconds, press an i-chord as you turn on the power to the Braille Lite. You hear, "System initialized; Braille Lite ready; Help is open; delete all data in file areas, enter y or n?" If you answer, "Yes", it says, "Are you sure?" to really force you to think. If you still answer, "Yes", you hear beeps while the Braille Lite "cleans up" things. Your data is irrevocably lost. This process insures that no one can recover your personal data - a good idea when exchanging your Braille Lite for an upgrade or a repaired machine. 2. When I turn on my Braille Lite, it gives the correct message, but every time I press a chord or key, it either says, "space" or "file is write-protected". You may have write-protected the currently open file and don't remember having done so. Get into the Files menu and press an i-chord to hear the status of the currently open file. If it is write-protected, unprotect it with a u-chord. Or, you may be in One-Handed mode. Hold down dot 3 as you power on. If that still does not fix it, hold down all seven keys when you power up to perform a "warm reset". 3. When I hit a chord, the Braille Lite resets, saying, "Braille Lite ready". This rarely happens, but a warm reset usually fixes the problem. 4. My Braille Lite turned on and is dead - no warning. A warm reset usually fixes this problem. But since the Braille Lite has no "battery low" message, it might mean that you've completely drained the built-in, rechargeable battery. Use the Braille Lite's A.C. adapter to plug it into an outlet and allow it to recharge. As long as you leave it plugged into an outlet, you should be able to use it without any problems. Once it's fully charged (in about two hours), you should be able to resume using it on battery power. 5. I have deleted a file (or portion of a file) accidentally; is there any way to get it back? This depends on whether you've done anything since your deletion. If you have not created another file, or performed another deletion, there is hope. Here are a couple of scenarios: First case: You've deleted text from the current cursor position to the end of the file. Recall that the Clipboard is a "trash can". The text you just deleted is there, or at least the first 4,096 characters of it. The rest of the text, if there was more than one Braille Lite "page" worth of text, is in another place in Braille Lite memory. Remember our analogy to the binder. It's as if the Braille Lite put the first page of the text you deleted into the Clipboard and the rest of the pages at the back of the binder. To bring them back where they belong into your currently open file, first press an ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6-chord) c to copy the contents of the Clipboard back into your currently open file, thus recovering the first "page" worth of text. Then from the Files menu, write a for-sign (dots 1-2-3-4-5-- 6). The Braille Lite says, "Recover file, enter y or n". Entering y should recover the rest of your text into your currently open file. Go to the end of the file and check the location of the cursor, as well as how much room there is left. If you see numbers that don't make sense or unwanted text, it probably means that you've recovered extraneous text. Press dot 1-chords and dots 2-3-chords to move backward through the file until you find the text that should have been the end of the file. Delete from that point forward to eliminate this junk from your file. Second case: You've just deleted the last file in your files list. You can recover the file from the Files menu using a similar procedure to the one just described. But you now have no file to fill with text. So the first step is to create a file with the appropriate number of pages you threw away. (If you're not sure of this number, then start with a one-page file. You may have to keep making the file bigger a page at a time and then performing the recover operation repeatedly until you have recovered the complete file.) Suppose you have a two-page file called "junk" you've just deleted by mistake. When you move through your files list, it's just not there. To start the recovery process from the Files menu, write a c to create a new file. Name the file anything you want. (The file's name is irrelevant to the Braille Lite. Just naming it the same name as the deleted file won't recover it.) Go ahead and answer the usual prompts for creating a new file. You should now be in an empty, open file. From the Files menu, write a for-sign (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6). At the prompt, write a y. You should recover the file, although you may have extraneous text to delete at its end. These are tricky maneuvers, but they may save important data for you. We suggest that you practice this procedure with a junk file before attempting it with real data. BRAILLE TRANSLATION QUESTIONS 1. I am using the Braille Lite as a speech synthesizer. When I hit a key on my PC, I get the Grade 2 equivalent, like do for d, can for c, etc. Speech box mode uses the Clipboard as a buffer. Go into the Clipboard and switch off the translator. 2. I am trying to use the Braille Lite calendar alert feature. I pasted the date correctly but I still don't hear the alert when I turn on the unit. If you entered the date in computer braille, the translator in the calendar file must be off. If you pasted the date in Grade 1 braille, the translator must remain on in the calendar file. See whether the date is written in computer braille or Grade 1 braille, and then make sure the translator is set to match. Also, see whether Calendar Check is "on" from the Status menu. BRAILLE DISPLAY QUESTIONS 1. My braille display is vibrating on and off. Why? The charge on the Braille Lite's built-in battery could be low. If a warm reset does not fix the problem, use the A.C. adapter to plug in the Braille Lite and give it back some energy. You should probably go ahead and let it recharge anyway, but as long as you leave it plugged into an outlet, you should be able to use it without any problems. 2. A dot on my display does not come up and I'm having a hard time reading text accurately, as a result. The dot could have dirt clogged in it. It's important that you keep the braille display as free from dirt as possible, and certainly, food is off-limits around the braille display. You'd be surprised how easily a tiny speck of the powdered sugar from that Bavarian cream-filled doughnut you had for breakfast can get caught in the display. You may not notice anything special at first, but over time, if you're not careful, dots will start acting finicky. Call us if this happens because you'll probably have to return the unit to us for repair. MISCELLANEOUS QUESTIONS 1. The o-chord k command gives the wrong answer. The calculation must be on a line by itself, with no other text. You must write it in computer braille - using dropped numbers and correct operator symbols - as though you were in the calculator. The Braille Lite must be in Line Reading mode, not Window or Sentence mode. 2. I've started to issue a command, like Insert text, or Find text, or a macro, but want to cancel the process. Abort with a z-chord. This command aborts almost any procedure. If, for example, you issue the Insert command and change your mind, a z-chord prevents unintended insertion of text. In addition, a z-chord aborts the transmission of data and releases the handshake line in the event of a "handshake hang-up". If you issue a z-chord from within the Help file, you leave Help and return to the file in which you were last working. 3. I don't hear anything when I press a backspace (b-chord). You might have duplex set to full or none. Go into the Status menu or the Parameters menu and change it to half. 4. The filenames on the disk in my PC or my disk drive are not the same as the names of the files that I transmitted from my Braille Lite. You must use MS DOS file naming conventions when naming Braille Lite files that you plan to send to a PC or to the external disk drive. We discussed this subject fully in Chapter 4. Briefly, the name of a file consists of a "filename" and "extension", separated by a period. The "filename" portion may contain up to eight characters, and the extension up to three characters. You may not use spaces or wildcard characters (the asterisk and question mark) in a filename. You do not have to use extensions but most MS DOS files have them, especially program files. Suppose you have a file in your Braille Lite called "phone book". When you send it to the PC, it truncates to "phoneboo" because DOS sees only the first eight characters and eliminates the space character. So, when you look for the file on the PC written as your Braille Lite knows it, you won't find it. It is there, but it's called "phone boo", not "phone book". 5. How and when can I use "wildcard" characters in filenames? You can use "wildcard" characters (the asterisk and the question mark) as part of filenames and their extensions from the Files menu during most commands that prompt you to "Enter filename" - deleting files, marking or unmarking files, getting file information, for example. The marking and unmarking process is available only in transmission of files with the ymodem or kermit modem protocols. These transmission options are available for the disk drive (Section 14.4.1), as well as for the serial port (Section 15.5) with the t-chord command from the Files menu. The asterisk and question mark must be entered in computer braille notation: dots 1-6 for the asterisk, dots 1-4-5-6 for the question mark. The asterisk replaces either the filename or the extension portion of the name of a file; the question mark replaces individual characters in either the filename or extension portion of the name of a file. Also, remember that the period must also be in computer braille (dots 4-6). See Appendix D for a complete listing of computer braille equivalents to the ASCII character set. Here are two examples: Suppose you have five files in your Braille Lite named "notes1", "notes2", etc. and you want to work with them as a group. At the "Enter filename" prompt, you may write "notes" followed by a question mark followed by an e- chord. All files that start with the letters "notes" are affected. Now, suppose you have several files that all have the extension ".brl". At the "Enter filename" prompt, you may write "*.brl" and an e-chord. All files having the ".brl" extension are affected. Of course, you may use the question mark more than once to affect groups of files where only some of the characters are the same and still use the asterisk for the filename or extension portion. For example, say you have a bunch of files where the filename portions are all different but whose extensions all start with a b and have different ending characters. Let's say the extensions of these files represent braille files for different states and you're using the two-letter abbreviation for the states. Your files have names like, "customer.bme", "vendor.bny", "dealers.bfl". You can use the wildcard name "*.b??" to refer to this group of files. 6. I can't kill a "file" on my disk drive. When I ask for a directory of files, the symbol appears after the file I can't erase. Why? It is not a file. It is a directory. While we won't get into a lengthy discussion of MS DOS commands and their meanings here, we'll try to clarify the difference between a "file" and a "directory". A file contains data you can access (for example, a letter, a spreadsheet), or a program you can run (a word processor or a database program). A directory is a grouping of files. It may contain only data files, or program files, or both. While the grouping of files in a directory is somewhat arbitrary, most people tend to group their program files in different directories than their data files. When program files and data files are related in some way - for example, the program files generate the data files - then the tendency is to group the data files generated by those particular program files in directories that are part of the directory that contains the program files. These are called subdirectories. Another way to picture it is this: your disk is like a filing cabinet with drawers (directories) that contain folders (subdirectories). The folders contain envelopes (files). In most cases, floppy disks aren't divided for you into directories and subdirectories. But, depending on the complexity of the program and data files on a disk, a person who is particular about keeping program files distinct from data files may create directories on a floppy disk. It's always a good idea to look closely at the contents of a disk when you first receive it. Who knows, its arrangement might surprise you. But now you know how to figure it out. 7. My Braille Lite's voice sounds very flat and it's not pausing smoothly at commas and periods when I read through my files. Somehow your voice inflection setting got turned off. Bring up the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and write an i. Then write a y to turn on voice inflection. Exit the Status menu with an e- chord. From now on, your Braille Lite should talk normally again. 8. I'm seeing prompts and messages on the braille display all in computer braille instead of Grade 1 braille. Somehow, your Grade 1 messages setting got turned off. Bring up the Status menu with an st-sign-chord and press a g-chord to jump to the setting. Write a y to turn it on. Exit the Status menu with an e-chord. From now on, any messages or prompts the Braille Lite displays should appear in Grade 1 braille. APPENDIX B: QUICK REFERENCE INTRODUCTION This appendix is a listing by subject of all the commands for the Braille Lite. It assumes that you're familiar with the concepts and just need to remind yourself of the key sequence for a command. For details on when and how to use a particular command, see the appropriate section in the manual that discusses it. First, some preliminary information about your Braille Lite: There is a limit of 77 files. The Braille Lite page is 4,096 characters. There are over 150 free pages in the Braille Lite. A single file may contain as many pages as desired, as long as that number does not exceed the 150-page limit. A line is defined as a block of text ending with a carriage return. A paragraph is defined as a block of text ending with two or more carriage returns or two or more carriage return/line feed pairs. Page format commands allow you to specify physical line length and page length when ready to transmit text to a printer or braille embosser. A "chord" refers to pressing down the spacebar simultaneously with a braille character. For example, an e-chord means to press down the spacebar simultaneously with dots 1 and 5. The phrase "(y,n)" means that you should choose y for Yes or n for No. Unless otherwise specified, a braille number sign (dots 3-4-5-6) is used only for clarity and the number indicated should be written in "dropped" or lowercase notation. For example, if you see a number sign followed by the letter a, which normally means the number one, you should write a dropped number one (dot 2). Spaces in command sequences are used only for readability. SPEECH PARAMETERS MENU Enter Speech Parameters menu - ar-sign-chord (dots 3-4-5-chord) Exit Speech Parameters menu saving current settings - e-chord or z-chord. Note: The following commands are entered from within the Speech Parameters menu. Softer volume - dot 1. Louder volume - dot 4. Slower speed - dot 2. Faster speed - dot 5. Lower pitch - dot 3. Higher pitch - dot 6. Lower frequency - dots 2-3. Higher frequency - dots 5-6. Cycle among keyboard modes (key echo, key click, silent keys) - spacebar. Toggle between speaking numbers as digits and as words - n. Do not announce any punctuation - z. Announce some punctuation - s. Announce most punctuation - m. Announce total punctuation, including spaces and control characters - t. Toggle enhanced speech box mode on/off - for-sign-chord (dots 1- 2-3-4-5-6-chord). block handshaking - b. line handshaking - l. * Toggle speech box mode on/off - ar-sign-chord twice Note: All serial input is spoken but not stored in the unit. Press any key from the Braille Lite keyboard or press Ctrl-X from the computer keyboard to silence the voice. Note: The following commands assume that speech box mode is on. They are used by a screen access program to alter the voice in the Braille Lite when it is acting as a speech synthesizer. Volume - Control e x v, where x represents a volume from 01 to 16, 01 being the lowest volume. Pitch - Control e x p, where x represents a pitch from 01 to 63, 01 being the lowest pitch. Speech rate - Control e x e, where x represents a rate from 01 to 16, 01 being the slowest speech rate. Frequency - Control e x t, where x represents a tone from 01 to 25, 01 being the lowest. Punctuation level - Control e followed by a, m, s, or z, where the letters represent All, Most, Some, or No punctuation, respec tively. Index marker - Control f. Silence command - Control x. * Toggle PC Master speech box mode on/off - ar-sign-chord p-chord. BRAILLE DISPLAY COMMANDS Move display right by up to 18 characters - Tap right end of advance bar. Move display left by up to 18 characters - Tap left end of advance bar. Note: The following commands work with the advance bar as chords with dot combinations (instead of the spacebar). Toggle 8-dot braille on/off - dropped 8 with advance bar. Toggle control characters on/off - c with advance bar. Toggle braille display on/off - d with advance bar. Toggle keyboard tracking on/off - k with advance bar. Toggle end display on carriage return on /off - r with advance bar. Toggle speech on/off - s with advance bar. Toggle serial tracking on/off - t with advance bar. Toggle cursor always visible on/off - v with advance bar. Toggle wordwrap on/off - w with advance bar. Power up with braille display only - b with on/off rocker switch. Power up with speech only - s with on/off rocker switch. Scroll braille display - er-sign-chord with speech off. (Stop scrolling with any chord.) Jump forward by one display at a time while scrolling - spacebar. Scroll display faster - dot 5. Scroll display slower - dot 2. Scroll display manually a character at a time - holding down advance bar: Scroll display right 1 character - dot 6. Scroll display left 1 character - dot 3. Note: Speech does not have to be off. FILE COMMANDS Enter Help file from any other file - th-sign-chord (dots 1-4-5- 6-chord). Pressing a z-chord returns you to your previously open file.. Open a file whose number is known - o-chord ##(## is a 2-digit number between 00-77). * Flip to last file opened before currently open file - o-chord l, or dots 1- 2-5-6-chord. Enter Files menu - o-chord f. Exit Files menu - e or e-chord. Note: The following commands all begin with o-chord f. If wildcard characters are permitted, a (w) appears after the command. Speak name and 2-digit number of currently pointed to file - c- chord. Spell name of currently pointed to file - dots 2-5-chord. Speak name of previous file in files list - dot 1-chord. Speak name of next file in files list - dot 4-chord. Move to top of files list - l-chord. Move to end of files list - dots 4-5-6-chord. Open an existing file - o (filename) e-chord. Delete a file - d (filename) e-chord (w). * Delete group of similarly named files - g (w). List all files, and number of free pages at end of list - l. Quick list of files - q. Verbose list of files - v. Tell name of currently open file - t. Tell complete information about currently open file - i-chord. (includes filename, braille translator status, number of pages, date and time when last modified, number of bytes in file, write-protect status). Tell date and time when currently open file was last modified - m-chord. Tell size of currently open file - wh-sign-chord (dots 1-5-6-chord). Write-protect currently open file - p. Unprotect currently open file - u. Make currently open file bigger - b. Make currently open file smaller - s. Rename currently open file - r. Tell complete information for specified file - i (file name) e-chord (w). (includes filename, braille translator status, number of pages, date and time when last modified, number of bytes in file, write-protect status). Tell date and time when specified file was last modified - m (filename) e-chord (w). Tell size of specified file - wh-sign (filename) e-chord (dots 1-5-6) (w). Tell number of free pages remaining in Braille Lite - f. Recover currently open file - for-sign (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6). Open pointed to file - o-chord. Delete pointed to file - d-chord. Make pointed to file bigger - b-chord. Make pointed to file smaller - s-chord. Rename pointed to file - r-chord. Tell complete information of pointed to file - i-chord. (includes filename, braille translator status, number of pages, date and time when last modified, number of bytes in file, write-protect status). Tell date and time when pointed to file was last modified - m-chord. Tell size of pointed to file - wh-sign- chord (dots 1-5-6-chord). * Temporarily copy files list into Clipboard - v-chord. * Open external program - x-chord. * Open external program with arguments - x, arguments, e-chord. * Move to next external program in files list - dot 5-chord. * Move to previous external program in files list - dot 2-chord. Move forward in files list with braille display - right end of advance bar. Move backward in files list with braille display - left end of advance bar. ENTERING TEXT Note: Any characters you write are appended to the end of the file unless you are in Insert mode or in Continuous Overwrite mode. Backspace over and erase character under cursor - b-chord. Speak current cursor position within file - wh-sign-chord (dots 1-5-6-chord). (announces column position from last carriage return and number of characters from beginning of file) * Speak current cursor position within physical print or braille page and line number or Braille Lite page - sh-sign-chord (dots 1-4-6-chord). (Enter b for braille page, p for print page, a for absolute Braille Lite page.) Speak room left in current file - r-chord. Uppercase only next character to be written - u-chord. (Use dot 6 instead when braille translation is on.) Uppercase lock - u-chord twice. (Do not use with braille translation turned on.) Uppercase unlock - q-chord. Overwrite current character - ow-sign-chord (dots 2-4-6-chord) * Continuous overwrite mode - ow-sign-chord twice. (Press ow-sign-chord again to turn it off or turn unit off.) Mark beginning of block of text at current cursor position - m- chord. Write a control character - x-chord followed by character. Write "escape" control character - x-chord followed by ow-sign (dots 2-4-6). (a left brace in computer braille) Write carriage return in control character form - x-chord m. Write a linefeed - x-chord j. Write a formfeed control character - x-chord l. Tab specified number of columns relative to last carriage return - dots 4-5-chord followed by dropped number. (Number refers to number of spaces from last carriage return.) CURSOR MOVEMENT AND SPEAKING OF TEXT Note: When a single character is spoken, its pitch is higher than normal if the character is in uppercase. Speak current character - dots 3-6-chord. Speak current character phonetically - dots 3-6-chord twice. (e.g., a alpha, b bravo. Continue moving back and forward a character at a time in this mode until any other chord is pressed.) * Speak ASCII value of current character - dots 3-6-chord three times. (e.g., 65 for uppercase a, 97 for lowercase a. Continue moving back and forward a character at a time in this mode until any other chord is pressed.) Move to and speak previous character - dot 3-chord. Move to and speak next character - dot 6-chord. Speak current word - dots 2-5-chord. Spell current word - dots 2-5-chord twice. (Continue moving back and forward a word at a time in this mode until any other chord is pressed.) Move to and speak previous word - dot 2-chord. Move to and speak next word - dot 5-chord. Speak current line - c-chord. Move back and speak previous line - dot 1-chord. Move forward and speak next line - dot 4-chord. Move back to previous paragraph - dots 2-3-chord. Move forward to next paragraph - dots 5-6-chord. Move to top of file - l-chord. Move to end of file - dots 4-5-6-chord. Speak all text from current cursor position to end of file - er- sign-chord (dots 1-2-4-5-6-chord). Move specified number of lines - number-sign-chord (dots 3-4-5- 6-chord) followed by dropped number (moving forward) or followed by a minus sign (dots 3-6) and a dropped number (moving backward). Skip blank lines when moving cursor - and-sign-chord (dots 1-2-3- 4-6-chord) (y, n). Speak windows, lines or sentences - w-chord w (windows), l (lines), or s (sentences). * Move to beginning of marked block of text - number-sign-chord (dots 3-4-5-6- chord) m. Switch into review mode - o-chord r. (Use strictly for reading through file without chording; for example, dot 1 reads previous line, dot 4 next line, dots 1-4 current line. Pressing any chord returns unit to normal operation.) FINDING, REPLACING, DELETING, AND INSERTING TEXT Note: The following commands all end with an e-chord but can be aborted by a z-chord from anywhere within the process before the e-chord is pressed (and for the Find command, even after the e- chord is pressed). Notes about Find mode: You can search for a block of text up to 63 characters in length. You can use backspace (b-chord) to make corrections in the character string as you write it. You can read the character string you have written so far by pressing a c-chord. Distinguish case sensitivity of text during a search - the- sign-chord (dots 2-3-4-6-chord) (y, n). (Case sensitivity is normally off.) Find text forward from current cursor position - f-chord followed by text to find e-chord. Find text backward from current cursor position - f-chord followed by text to find th-sign-chord (dots 1-4-5-6-chord). * Search and replace text - f-chord, text to find, r-chord, replacement text, e-chord; then r for replace, s for skip, or a for all. (If search string is not found, process aborts.) * Find date in currently open file - f-chord, g-chord, date in mmddyy format, e-chord. (Date must be entered in dropped number notation.) Notes about the Clipboard and deleting or inserting text: * When a block of text (up to 4,095 characters in length) is deleted, it goes into the Clipboard temporarily. The contents of the clipboard is cleared when Speech box mode or certain disk drive commands are activated. At such times, the contents of the clipboard is related to those activities. To delete larger blocks of text, and possibly recover them completely from the Clipboard, you can make the Clipboard bigger, as you can any other file except the Help file, through the Files menu. When text is copied into the Clipboard to prepare it for insertion, it is not deleted from the currently open file. * You can insert a block of text the size of the Clipboard file (set to one Braille Lite page of 4,096 characters). You can insert even larger blocks by making the Clipboard bigger. Notes about deleting text: Place cursor at beginning of block of text to delete. All delete commands begin with a d-chord. * Move through the Delete Parameters menu with chords: dot 1-chord to move back a choice, dot 4-chord to move forward a choice, l-chord to move to the first choice, dots 4-5-6-chord to move to the last choice, or jump to a choice by writing its first letter. To delete multiple blocks of text, follow the appropriate letter with a dropped number. Complete all delete commands with an e-chord. Delete current character(s) - d-chord c e-chord. Delete current word(s) - d-chord w e-chord. Delete current line(s) - d-chord l e-chord. (must have Windows set to Lines) Delete current sentence(s) - d-chord s e-chord. (must have Windows set to Sentences) Delete current paragraph(s) - d-chord p e-chord. Delete from current cursor position to end of file - d-chord z e-chord. Delete from beginning of marked block of text to current cursor position - d-chord m e-chord. (Before executing the command, mark beginning of text to be deleted with an m-chord. Then place cursor one character beyond endpoint of block of text to be deleted.) * Delete block of text - b, search string at endpoint of block, e-chord. (Place cursor at beginning of text to be deleted. Then press d-chord, b. Enter string of characters up to which text should be deleted. Press e-chord.) Notes about Insert mode: Text is inserted at the current cursor position, instead of being appended to the end of the file. You can use backspace (b-chord) to make corrections in the text you're inserting. * You can review the text you're inserting by pressing any of the reading commands (e.g., dot 1-chord, c-chord). Insert text into currently open file - i-chord, text to be inserted, e-chord. * Insert today's date into currently open file - ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6- chord), d. * Insert current time into currently open file - ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6- chord), t. * Insert specified date into currently open file - ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6- chord), g, date in mmddyy format, e-chord. Insert text from Clipboard into currently open file - ing-sign-chord (dots 3- 4-6-chord), c. (Before executing the command, mark beginning of text to be pasted with an m-chord. Find its endpoint and press a gh-sign-chord (dots 1-2-6- chord) to copy it into the Clipboard. Then perform the insertion.) * FORMATTING TEXT Notes: Formatting strings override Status menu settings. All formatting strings are written directly into file to be formatted for print or braille output. They all begin with $-sign (dots 1-2-4-6) and are surrounded by spaces on either side. For example, the formatting string to turn on underlining is written "space $ub space". Where you see "nn" as part of a string, replace it with the appropriate number. The formatting strings for page number positioning work only for documents to be printed. Braille page numbers always appear at top right. Set left margin - $mlnn. Set right margin - $mrnn. Set top margin - $mtnn. Set bottom margin - $mbnn. Set page length - $plnn. Set page width - $pwnn. Increase left margin by number - $ml_+nn. Decrease left margin by number - $ml-nn. Increase right margin by number - $mr+nn. Decrease right margin by number - $mr-nn. Increase top margin by number - $mt+nn. Decrease top margin by number - $mt-nn. Increase bottom margin by number - $mb+nn. Decrease bottom margin by number - $mb-nn. Pause printer for user to press key after each page - $w. New line - $l. New paragraph - $p. New page - $f. Center current line - $c. No justification - $jn. Right justification - $jr. Full justification - $jf. Number pages in Arabic numerals - $pnar. Number pages in Roman numerals - $pnrn. No page numbering - $pnnp. Print page number at top lef - $pntl. Print page number at top center - $pntc. Print page number at top right - $pntr. Print page number at bottom left - $pnbl. Print page number at bottom center - $pnbc. Print page number at bottom right - $pnbr. Set new page number - $pnnn. Move to next tab position - $t. Set size of tab - $tsnn. Move to column relative to left margin - $tonn. Outdent left margin one tab position for current line - $out. Set line spacing - $lsnn. Begin underline - $ub. Finish underline - $uf. Begin italics - $ib. Finish italics - $if. Begin boldface - $bb. Finish boldface - $bf. Begin doublestrike - $dbsb. Finish doublestrike - $dbsf. End text formatting and stop printing - $ef. Insert current time in to text at time of printing - $tm. Insert current date into text at time of printing - $dt. Begin running header - $hb. Disable running header - $h-. Enable running header - $h+. Begin running footer - $fb. Disable running footer - $f-. Enable running footer - $f+. End running header or running footer - $-. Respect braille translator setting for file - $brl+. Assume file is in computer braille, do not translate - $brl-. Display status of page number being printed - $st. (Use to hear page number being printed at specific point in file, or simply press spacebar at any point during printing process to hear page being printed.) Begin strikeout - $sob. Finish strikeout - $sof. Begin skipping text (do not print) - $(. Resume printing after skipped text - $). CLOCK AND CALENDAR Speak current time - o-chord t. Set time - o-chord s t. Set announcement of time to American time - o-chord s a. (12-hour with a.m. and p.m.) Set announcement of time to European time - o-chord s e. (24-hour). Speak today's date - o-chord d. Set date - o-chord s d. (month, day, year). Copy today's date into currently open file at cursor position - ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6-chord) d. Copy current time into currently open file at cursor position - ing-sign-chord (dots 3-4-6-chord) t. * Copy specified date into currently open file at cursor position - ing-sign- chord, g, date in mmddyy format, e-chord. Get specified date - o-chord, g, date in mmddyyyy format, e-chord. Get date a specified number of days from today - o-chord, g, number, e-chord. (Enter numbers in dropped number notation. A number by itself is counted forward from today and a number preceded by a minus (dots 3-6) counts backward from today; e.g., o-chord g 90 e-chord counts 90 days forward from today whereas o-chord g -90 e-chord counts 90 days backward from today) Get count of days from beginning of current year to today - o- chord g e-chord. Check calendar for today's reminders (if any) - o-chord a. (If today is in your Calendar file, answer y to the prompt for opening the Calendar file. If you don't want to open the Calendar file at this time, write an n. You'll be back in your currently open file.) STOPWATCH/COUNT-DOWN TIMER Enter stopwatch or timer mode - o-chord w. Exit stopwatch or timer mode - z-chord. Exit timer mode with timer still running - e-chord. Start or stop stopwatch or timer - dot 6. Reset timer - dot 3. Read time on timer - spacebar. Speak last time read - c. Start count-down timer - number-sign (dots 3-4-5-6), minutes, e-chord, seconds, e-chord. (Use only dropped numbers. Press another e-chord to exit count-down timer to time in background.) * Check remaining time while running timer in background - o-chord number-sign (dots 3-4-5-6). (If time is up, unit says, "Stopped".) SCIENTIFIC CALCULATOR Enter calculator mode - o-chord c. Exit calculator mode - z-chord. Speak current line - c-chord. Execute calculation or speak current result - e-chord. Set precision level to calculate to specified decimal place - p-chord. (up to 12 decimal places) Clear calculator to 0 - dots 3-5-6-chord. Toggle between speaking numbers as digits or as words - f-chord. Operators accepted by the calculator: plus - dots 3-4-6. minus - dots 3-6. times - dots 1-6. divided by - dots 3-4. percent - dots 1-4-6. Square root - dots 3-4-5-chord. * Store current result in memory locations - s-chord followed by a letter from a through z, except r. (r has latest result computed by pressing e-chord.) * Recall contents of a memory location - the letters a through z. Calculate expression on current line of currently open file - o-chord k. * Notes on using functions: Enter function name in computer braille with arguments enclosed in parentheses and separated by commas. In computer braille, an opening parenthesis is dots 1-2-3-5-6 and a closing parenthesis is dots 2-3-4-5-6. All arguments must be entered in computer braille, using dropped numbers, and the computer braille symbol for comma, dot 6. The expressions "arg1", "arg2", etc. refer to the arguments (numbers or other mathematical expressions) to be placed within the parentheses. Expressions (including arguments) within parentheses may not exceed 250 characters. abs(arg) - Absolute value of argument. avg(arg list) - Averages numbers in argument list. max(arg list) - Computes largest number within argument list. min(arg list) - Computes smallest number within argument list. mod(arg1, arg2) - Computes remainder of dividing argument 1 by argument 2. sum(arg list) - Totals numbers in argument list. sqrt(arg) - Computes square root of argument. pi - Computes value of pi to precision level set (e.g., 3.14159). Degrees mode - d-chord. Radians mode - r-chord. tan(arg) - tangent of argument. cot(arg) - Cotangent of argument. atan(arg) - Arctangent of argument. sin(arg) - Sine of argument. asin(arg) - Arcsine of argument. cos(argu) - Cosine of argument. acos(arg) - Arccosine of argument. log10(arg) - Log to the base 10 of argument. alog10(arg) - Antilog base 10 of argument (where argument is exponent to which 10 is raised). exp(arg) - Computes e to the power specified by argument (e.g., exp(2) computes e squared). log(arg) - Log to the base e (natural log) of argument. alog(arg) - Antilog base e of argument (where argument is exponent to which e is raised; e.g., alog(1) computes to e itself). round(arg) - Integer part of argument (up if decimal exceeds .5, down if decimal is less than .5). trunc(arg) - Integer part of argument (regardless of decimal part). div(arg1, arg2) - Integer division of argument 1 by argument 2. stddev(arg list) - Standard deviation of argument list. median(arg list) - Median number of numbers in argument list. faren(arg) - Converts argument to Fahrenheit temperature. centi(arg) - Converts argument to Centigrade temperature. in(arg) - Converts centimeter argument to inches. cm(arg) - Converts inch argument to centimeters. l(arg) - Converts gallon argument to liters. gal(arg) - Converts liter argument to gallons. kg(arg) Converts pound argument to kilograms. lb(arg) - Converts kilogram argument to pounds. g(arg) - Converts ounce argument to grams. oz(arg) - Converts gram argument to ounces. power(arg1, arg2) - Raise argument 1 to the power argument 2. root(arg1, arg2) - Compute the argument 2 root of argument 1. recip(arg) Reciprocal of argument. fact(argu) - factorial of argument. MACROS Note: A macro name may be any braille symbol: the entire alphabet plus any Grade 2 braille symbol. A key definition may be up to 63 characters in length and you may have up to 64 macros at one time. Start recording a macro - n-chord. End or stop recording a macro - n-chord. Play a macro - j-chord followed by specified braille symbol of pre-recorded macro. (e.g., j-chord s plays a macro you had previously recorded under the name s.) Nest macros - n-chord, macro name, macro commands, j-chord, pre-recorded macro name. (Include name of pre-recorded macro during recording of new macro to reduce number of commands in current macro.) Kill speech during playing of macro - k-chord. Voice speech during playing of macro - v-chord. Record pause for user entry when played - ch-sign-chord (dots 1-6-chord) for single character entry, ch-sign-chord twice for full line entry. (Include during recording of macro to generate pause when you play it. When you play macro, it pauses for you to enter single character or full line. If your entry is a full line, end it with an e-chord. e.G., n-chord, s, f-chord, ch-sign-chord twice, e-chord twice, n-chord. This creates macro called "s" that issues a Find command, then pauses for your input. After you write search string and press e-chord, it searches for that text.) Write-protect all macros - n-chord p-chord. Unprotect all macros - n-chord u-chord. *Record prompt for user when macro is played - dots 2-5-6-chord, text of prompt, e-chord. (Include in recording of macro to produce prompt for you to do something when you play it. Include v-chord to voice macro speech in recording of macro just before point where prompt occurs, then k-chord to kill macro speech after prompt occurs.) SPELLCHECK FUNCTIONS Note: To use the spellchecker, load the file "spell.dic" from the external disk drive or from a PC. Load spellchecker from disk drive - s-chord, y, r, spell.dic, e-chord. Enter spellcheck mode - o-chord ch-sign (dots 1-6) Exit spellcheck mode - z-chord. Note: The following commands are performed within spellcheck mode. Spellcheck current word - w. Spellcheck from current cursor position to end of file - z. (If word is not found, use following commands): Add word to personal dictionary - a. Bypass word for rest of file - b. Read word in context - c. Enter correct word - e. Help - h. Overlook current word - o. Repeat incorrect word - r. Spell incorrect word phonetically - dots 3-6-chord. Give suggested replacement words - s. (Use dot 1-chord, and dot 4-chord to move backward and forward respectively through suggestion list. Replace incorrect word with suggested choice by pressing e-chord. Exit suggestion list without choosing a replacement word by pressing z-chord.)) DISK DRIVE FUNCTIONS Note: MS DOS file naming conventions and wildcard characters hold for this section; that is, a filename may contain up to eight characters and an extension up to three characters. See your DOS user's manual for details, or review Sections 4.2, 6.7, and Appendix A in your Braille Lite manual. Load file from disk drive - s-chord l. Save file to disk drive - s-chord s. (regardless of file's page format) Transmit print textfile with page formatting to disk drive - s-chord t (filename) e-chord. Transmit braille textfile with page formatting to disk drive - s-chord b (filename) e-chord. Kill (delete) file on disk in drive - s-chord k (filename) e- chord. Format disk in drive - s-chord f (y, n). * Speak directory of files in drive - s-chord d. (Add /n for unsorted files list, /w for time and date information on each file in directory.) Add volume label to disk in drive - s-chord v followed by label name e-chord. Make subdirectory on disk in drive - s-chord m followed by subdirectory name e-chord. Delete subdirectory from disk in drive - s-chord x followed by subdirectory name e-chord. * Load pointed to file from directory into Braille Lite - s-chord g. (Directory is in Clipboard. Find file to load from disk with dot 4- chords. Then execute command to load.) Resume file transfer from disk - s-chord r. Transmit file(s) to disk using ymodem protocol - s-chord y, marked filename(s), e-chord. Transmit file(s) to and from disk using Files menu - o-chord, f, t-chord, s to send or r to receive, modem protocol, filename(s), e-chord. (If drive is connected and turned on, modem protocols from within Files menu t-chord command can be used. See next section for modem protocol options or review Chapter 14 in the Braille Lite manual. Press s-chord or r-chord instead of s or r to hear names of files as they transmit.) TRANSMITTING DATA * Note: Move through Transmit Parameters menu backward with dot 1-chord, forward with dot 4-chord, l-chord for first choice, dots 4-5-6-chord for last choice, or write first letter of choice. Press c-chord to hear current choice. * Transmit to parallel port, instead of serial port, by pressing chords rather than letter of menu choice (e.g., t-chord twice to send entire file or t-chord l-chord to send just current line of text out through parallel port). Enter Transmit Parameters menu - t-chord. Abort transmission - z-chord. Transmit all text in currently open file - t-chord t. Transmit all text in currently open file with braille translation off - t-chord b. Transmit line from cursor to next carriage return) - t-chord l. Transmit block of text from cursor to mark - t- chord m. Transmit paragraph from cursor to next pair of carriage returns or carriage return /linefeeds) - t-chord p. Transmit entire currently open file without braille translation or page format parameters - t-chord s. (used mostly for backup purposes) Transmit block of text from current cursor position to end of currently open file - t-chord z. * Transmit block of text with page format considerations to file - t-chord f, Transmit Parameter menu choice, filename, e-chord. Choose any menu choice: b, l, m, p, s, t, or z.) Notes on Modem Protocols: The following commands are issued from the Files menu. Press o-chord f to enter it. If a disk drive is attached to the disk drive port, the following commands automatically assume you want to transmit files to the disk drive. Otherwise, the following commands assume that you want to transmit files via the serial port. To send files using the ymodem protocol, mark them individually with a y, y-chord or m-chord, unmark them with an n or u-chord as you cycle through your files list. The spacebar toggles the pointed to file between being marked and being unmarked. Mark all files at once with an m, unmark them all at once with a u. Wildcard characters are allowed for sending or receiving multiple files of similar names using MS DOS wildcard character conventions; e.g., "*.txt" sends all files with ".txt" extension.) Transmit files using modem protocols - t-chord s (send) or r (receive). xmodem - x (filename) e-chord. xmodem 1k (only for sending file) - 1 (filename) e-chord. ymodem or ymodem g - y (filename) e-chord. kermit - k (filename) e-chord. (Press s-chord or r-chord instead of s or r to hear names of files as they transmit.) OPTIONS MENU Note: The following commands begin with an o-chord. * Hear current choice with c-chord. Move backward a choice with dot 1-chord, forward a choice with dot 4-chord, to first choice with l-chord, to last choice with dots 4-5-6-chord. Choose option by pressing e-chord. Or, write letter or character that jumps to choice. In that case, an e-chord is not needed. Calendar check - a. Braille display - b. Calculator - c. Today's date - d. File commands - f. Smart calendar - g. Calculate line - k. * Flip to last file opened before currently open file - l. (Or press dots 1-2-5-6-chord instead of o-chord l.) Review mode - r. Set time/date - st or sd. Spellcheck - ch-sign (dots 1-6). Time - t. Say count-down timer - number-sign (dots 3-4-5-6). Speech - s. Stopwatch - w. Execute program - x. PARAMETERS MENU Note: The following commands begin with a p-chord. An e- chord is not needed to complete them (with the exception of the "Window length" parameter). * Hear current choice with a c-chord. Move backward a choice with dot 1- chord, forward a choice with dot 4-chord, to first choice with l-chord, to last choice with dots 4-5-6-chord, or write letter or character that jumps to choice. Add linefeeds during transmission of data - a (y, n). Set Baud rate - b. Cursor tracking - c (y, n). Set duplex - d (h,f, or n). Set handshaking - h (s, h, or n). Reject ornamentation characters - o (y, n). Set parity - p (n, e, or o). Speak revision date - r. Set stop bits - s (1 or 2). Set braille translator on/off - t (y, n). Set window length (window, lines or sentences) - w (w, l, or s). Activate serial port - dots 2-6 (y, n). Set data bits - dots 4-5-6 (7 or 8). * Serial number - (user specific). STATUS MENU DEFAULT SETTINGS Notes: The following parameters are reset every time you perform a warm, cold or hard reset. Settings are listed here in the same order in which they appear in the menu as you cycle through it. Hear the current choice with a c-chord. Cycle forward with dot 4-chords, backward with dot 1-chords. Jump to the first choice with an l-chord, to the last choice with a dots 4-5-6-chord. To jump directly to a setting, see the listing in brackets immediately following each default setting. For most settings, change status on/off with Y or N. For those settings requiring another response, write your choice and press an e-chord to save that choice. * Cycle to group of settings backward with dots 2-3-chord, forward with dots 5-6-chord. Groups include: Serial Parameters, Miscellaneous Parameters, Format Parameters, Braille Display Parameters. Enter Status menu - st-sign-chord (dots 3-4-chord). Exit Status menu - e-chord. Interactive mode - off [g]. Serial port active - off [f]. Baud rate - 9600 [b]. (Use first or first two digits of Baud rate to change setting.) Parity - none [p]. (e for even, o for odd, n for none) Duplex - half [d]. (f for full, h for half, n for none) Data bits - 8 [dots 4-5-6]. (7 or 8) Stop bits - 1 [s]. (1 or 2) Handshake - software [h]. (s for software, h for hardware, or n for no handshaking) Add linefeeds when transmitting - off [a]. Braille translator - off [t]. Cursor tracking - on [c]. Revision date - current revision date of Braille Lite [r]. Speak windows, lines or sentences - lines [v] (w for windows, l for lines, s for sentences) Reject ornamentation characters - off [o] (limits repetitive punctuation to two occurrences; rejects decorative control characters) Skip blank lines - on [&] (and-sign, dots 1-2-3-4-6). Distinguish case during find - off [the-sign] (dots 2-3-4-6). Battery use - number of hours, minutes since battery was last reset [th-sign] (dots 1-4-5-6). (Reset timer with dropped 0 (dots 3-5-6).) % not charging - x% [sh-sign] (dots 1-4-6). Beep at column - 0 [q]. * Printer is - Imagewriter [l] (Or Epson-compatible) * Print line length - 0 [l]. * Print left margin - 0. * Print page length - 0. * Print top margin - 0. * Braille Line length - 0. * Braille left margin - 0. * Braille page length - 0. * Braille top margin - 0. Window length -80 [w]. (Voice window from 20 to 80 characters in length, no effect on formatting or printing of text) Interactive timeout - 0 [x]. Double-space - off [ar-sign] (dots 3-4-5). Voice inflection - on [i]. Number pages - off [#] (number-sign, dots 3-4-5-6) Power reminder - on [z]. Ham calls - off [m]. Calendar check - on [j]. Word exceptions check - on [e]. Progress clicks - on [k]. * Make parameters file-specific - off [dots 1-2-3-5-6]. * Speak words in say-all mode - off [dots 2-3-4-5-6]. Braille display - on [b-chord]. Speech - on [s-chord]. 8-dot mode - off [dropped 8-chord]. * Serial tracking - on [t-chord]. * Keyboard tracking - on [k-chord]. Control chars - off [x-chord]. Cursor always visible - off [v-chord]. Wordwrap - on [w-chord]. End display on cariage return - off [r-chord]. Display all - on [for-sign-chord] (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6-chord). Grade 1 messages - on [g-chord]. * Reverse advance - off [dots 4-5-6-chord]. MISCELLANEOUS COMMANDS Power up Braille Lite silently - Hold down spacebar as you turn on unit. Enable one-handed mode - Hold down dot 6 as you turn on unit. Disable one-handed mode and return to normal use - Hold down dot 3 as you turn on unit. Note: Add linefeeds reverts to "on" when a warm or cold reset is executed. Warm reset with unit on - for-sign-chord (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6-chord) twice. (Resets most parameters to default settings without loss of current data in files; press the second for-sign-chord to confirm.) Power up with warm reset - Hold down for-sign-chord (dots 1-2-3-4-5-6-chord) as you turn on unit. (CAUTION: Use as last-resort option to attempt file recovery or if machine has stopped working properly. Files must be recovered using the process described in Appendix A of the manual.) Power up with cold reset - Hold down i-chord as you turn on unit. (Caution: Use as last resort for a crash recovery or when returning unit for exchange unit; wipes out all data. See Appendix A of the manual.) Enter "Alt" key from the Braille Lite into PC - dots 3-5-chord followed by dropped number from 0 to 255, e-chord Turn interactive mode on/off - g-chord. Do not translate text between symbols - dot 4, dash, followed by text not to be translated, followed by dot 4, l. (Place a space on either side of the opening and closing symbols, but no space between the dot 4 and the dash or dot 4 and the l. e.G., dot 4 dash Do not translate this sentence. dot 4 l) APPENDIX C: TECHNICAL DATA ABOUT PORTS The following technical information provides special cabling arrangements for using the Braille Lite with devices for which we do not offer specific cables. The Braille Lite is a DCE device. You'll need a null modem cable to interface the unit with other DCE devices. The Braille Lite has two male interface ports. The one closer to you when the machine is in normal operating position is for the disk drive (Chapter 14), and is intended specifically for use with that device. The port closer to the A.C. adapter jack is an RS-232 serial port (Chapter 15. Below, we list its active pin assignments for your convenience. (Note that the cable we provide for this port has 9 pin locations on the end which connects to the port and 25 pin locations at the end that connects to an external device.) Pin 2 - Data Receive (DR). Data transmitted to the Braille Lite. Pin 3 - Data Send (DS). Data transmitted from the Braille Lite. Pin 5 - Clear To Send (CTS). Note: The Braille Lite sets this line high when it is able to accept data, indicating to the DTE that it is clear to send to the Braille Lite. If the Braille Lite cannot accept data (e.g., a full file), it lowers this line, signalling the DTE to stop sending. Pin 6 - Data Set Ready (DSR). Note: The Braille Lite outputs this line high whenever its power is on (even if the serial port power is not on as with Serial Port Inactive). Pin 8 - tied to pin 6. Has no function of its own. Pin 20 - Data Terminal Ready (DTR). This line is an input to the Braille Lite, signal ling the unit that it can transmit to the external device. If no device is connected, this line is pulled high. APPENDIX D: ASCII BRAILLE SYMBOLS Note: This is the list of computer braille equivalents for the ASCII character set, including punctuation, numbers, etc. The extended ASCII character set - Greek letters and the like - is omitted. In this listing, information is presented in this order: First, character name (names of numerals and punctuation marks spelled out and presented in regular alphabetic sequence), decimal numeric order of character in ASCII table, the word "dots" followed by the Braille dot numbers used to produce braille equivalent of character. In the case of control (Ctrl) characters, dot patterns are omitted. Items are separated by semicolons. A, Uppercase; 65; dot 1. a, lowercase; 97; dot 1. Accent; 96; dot 4 (lowercase). Acknowledge; 6; Ctrl-F. Ampersand; 38; dots 1-2-3-4-6. Apostrophe; 39; dot 3. Asterisk; 42; dots 1-6. At Sign; 64; dot 4 (uppercase). B, uppercase; 66; dots 1-2. b, lowercase; 98; dots 1-2. Backspace; 8; Ctrl-H. backslash, (Reverse Slant); 92; dots 1-2-5-6 (uppercase). Bell; 7; Ctrl-G. C, uppercase; 67; dots 1-4. c, lowercase; 99; dots 1-4. Cancel; 24; Ctrl-X. Caret, (Exponentiation); 94; dots 4-5 (uppercase). Carriage Return; 13; Ctrl-M. Close Brace; 125; dots 1-2-4-5-6 (lowercase). Close Bracket; 93; dots 1-2-4-5-6 (uppercase). Close Parenthesis; 41; dots 2-3-4-5-6. Colon; 58; dots 1-5-6. comma; 44; dot 6. D, uppercase; 68; dots 1-4-5. d, lowercase; 100; dots 1-4-5. Data Line Escape; 16; Ctrl-P. Decimal point (period); 46; dots 4-6. Delete; 127; dots 4-5-6 (lowercase). Device Control 1; 17; Ctrl-Q. Device Control 2; 18; Ctrl-R. Device Control 3; 19; Ctrl-S. Device Control 4; 20; CtrlT. Divided by, (Slash); 47; dots 3-4. Dollar Sign; 36; dots 1-2-4-6. E, Uppercase; 69; dots 1-5. e, lowercase; 101; dots 1-5. eight; 56; dots 2-3-6. End of Medium; 25; Ctrl-Y. End of Transmission; 4; Ctrl-D. End of Text; 3; Ctrl-C. Enquire; 5; Ctrl-E. Equals; 61; dots 1-2-3-4-5-6. Escape; 27; Ctrl-Open Bracket. Exclamation point; 33; dots 2-3-46. Exponentiation, (Caret); 94; dots 4-5 (uppercase.F, Uppercase; 70; dots 1-2-4. f, lowercase; 102; dots 1-2-4. File Separator; 28; Ctrl-Reverse Slant. five; 53; dots 2-6. Form Feed; 12; Ctrl-L. four; 52; dots 2-5-6. G, Uppercase; 71; dots 1-2-4-5. g, lowercase; 103; dots 1-2-4-5. Grave Accent, (Accent); 96; dot 4 (lowercase). Greater Than, (Right Angle Bracket); 62; dots 3-4-5. Group Separator; 29; Ctrl-Close Bracket. H, Uppercase; 72; dots 1-2-5. h, lowercase; 104; dots 1-2-5. Horizontal Tabulation; 9; Ctrl-I. Hyphen, (minus); 45; dots 3-6. I, Uppercase; 73; dots 2-4. i, lowercase; 105; dots 2-4. J, Uppercase; 74; dots 2-4-5. j, lowercase; 106; dots 2-4-5. K, Uppercase; 75; dots 1-3. k, lowercase; 107; dots 1-3. L, Uppercase; 76; dots 1-2-3. l, lowercase; 108; dots 1-2-3. Left Angle Bracket, (Less Than); 60; dots 1-2-6. Less Than,(Left Angle bracket); 60; dots 1-2-6. Line Feed; 10; Ctrl-J. M, Uppercase; 77; dots 1-3-4. m, lowercase; 109; dots 1-3-4. Minus, (hyphen); 45; dots 3-6. N, Uppercase; 78; dots 1-3-4-5. n, lowercase; 110; dots 1-3-4-5. Negative Acknowledgement; 21; Ctrl-U. nine; 57; dots 3-5. Null; 0; Ctrl-At Sign. Number Sign; 35; dots 3-4-5-6. O, Uppercase; 79; dots 1-3-5. o, lowercase; 111; dots 1-3-5. one 49; dot 2. Open Brace; 123; dots 2-4-6 (lowercase). Open Bracket; 91; dots 2-4-6 (uppercase). Open Parenthesis; 40; dots 1-2-3-5-6. P, Uppercase; 80; dots 1-2-3-4. p, lowercase; 112; dots 1-2-3-4. Percent Sign; 37; dots 1-4-6. Period, (Decimal); 46; dots 4-6. Plus; 43; dots 3-4-6. Q, Uppercase; 81; dots 1-2-3-4-5. q, lowercase; 113; dots 1-2-3-4-5. Question Mark; 63; dots 1-4-5-6. Quotation Mark, (Double Quote); 34; dot 5. R, Uppercase; 82; dots 1-2-3-5. r, lowercase; 114; dots 1-2-3-5. Record Separator; 30; Ctrl-Caret. Reverse Slant, (backslash); 92; dots 1-2-5-6 (uppercase). Right Angle Bracket, (Greater Than); 62; dots 3-4-5. S, Uppercase; 83; dots 2-3-4. s, lowercase; 115; dots 2-3-4. Semicolon; 59; dots 5-6. seven; 55; dots 2-3-5-6. Shift In; 15; Ctrl-O. Shift Out; 14; Ctrl-N. six; 54; dots 2-3-5. Space; 32; No dots. Start of Heading; 1; Ctrl-A. Start of Text; 2; Ctrl-B. Substitute; 26; Ctrl-Z. Synchronous Idle; 22; Ctrl-V. T, Uppercase; 84; dots 2-3-4-5. t, lowercase; 116; dots 2-3-4-5. three; 51; dots 2-5. Tilde; 126; dots 4-5 (lowercase). two; 50; dots 2-3. U, Uppercase; 85; dots 1-3-6. u, lowercase; 117; dots 1-3-6. Underline; 95; dots 4-5-6(uppercase). Unit Separator; 31; Ctrl-Underline. V, Uppercase; 86; dots 1-2-3-6. v, lowercase; 118; dots 1-2-3-6. Vertical Line; 124; dots 1-2-5-6 (lowercase). Vertical Tabulation; 11; Ctrl-K. W, Uppercase; 87; dots 2-4-5-6. w, lowercase; 119; dots 2-4-5-6. X, Uppercase; 88; dots 1-3-4-6. x, lowercase; 120; dots 1-3-4-6. Y, Uppercase; 89; dots 1-3-4-5-6. y, lowercase; 121; dots 1-3-4-5-6. Z, Uppercase; 90; dots 1-3-5-6. z, lowercase; 122; dots 1-3-5-6. zero; 48; dots 3-5-6