Chisel is a Free Software set of tools and filters to use Braille embossers in Unix systems. Most of the time it is used in conjunction with CUPS.
- (Optional) Edit
Makefile.config
to suit your needs. make
make install
Also, you may want to set the installation prefix by passing PREFIX=/usr
(or any other path) to the Make invocation.
Packagers may want to pass DESTDIR=/path/to/tmpdir
in the installation
step, to perform installation in an alternative file system root.
The following command can be used to list the supported devices:
chisel -S chisel-ppd list simple
(Changing simple
to plain
will list only first column with the device
identifiers.)
A PostScript Printer Definition (PPD) file to be used with other printing systems like CUPS is can be obtained by providing the device identifier to the following command:
chisel -S chisel-ppd cat device-id > file.ppd
The following command can be used to convert a text file to a file in the [Chisel device-independent document format]:
chisel -S texttochisel < input.txt > output.chsl
This is a basic tool, and doesn't touch any options, but can be useful
as a starting point. You can manually edit the resulting document
output.chsl
to configure the needed options (see docformat.md
for
the available configurable options). It is also possible to pass
document-global options as command line arguments:
chisel -S texttochisel copies=5 < input.txt > output.chsl
Provided that a file is already in the Chisel device-independent
document format (examples can be found under the
doc/examples/
subdirectory), the next command can be used to render
it into a raw stream of data that can be then sent to the device. For
example for an Index Braille Basic-D device:
chisel -S chiseltodev device=indexbraille/basic-d \
< input.chsl > output.raw
Then, supposing that the embosser device is the /dev/lp0
device, it
can be sent directly to it:
cat output.raw > /dev/lp0
or even directly using the device as output for the command above:
chisel -S chiseltodev device=indexbraille/basic-d \
< input.chsl > /dev/lp0
The raw output files contain all the information that a particular device model needs to know to properly emboss a document. Note that raw output generated for one device cannot be used for another which is a different model.