The Many Ways to Capitalize (or Capitalise) - SusanJ/UEB_back GitHub Wiki

This article addresses the capitalization of English letters in UEB.

The one-cell braille symbols for the 26 English letters represent the small letters. Individual capital letters, i.e, capital letters not in contact with other capital letters, are represented by two-cell symbols which consist of a dot-6 prefix cell followed by the cell which would otherwise be the symbol for the corresponding small letter. (Dot-6 has long been used for this purpose; it was formerly referred to as "single caps".) Appreciating that individual capital letters are represented in UEB by two-cell symbols and not by the same sequence of braille cells considered as an indicator followed by a one-cell symbol is important to understanding the overall implementation of UEB. However, this distinction likely makes little difference to the braille reader.

Actually, what I've just written might be a bit misleading. The rules implicitly refer to the corresponding print text, not to the braille text per se. This is because UEB uses contractions which are special braille symbols that represent longer sequences of print letters. So if, for example, one wished to represent the titlecase form of the word the in contracted braille, that is to represent print The, the dot-6 cell would be placed before the one-cell, dots-2346, braille contraction for the print word the. (Of course, as persons familiar with braille know, that same contraction may usually also be used to represent the letter sequence "the" in longer words.) The Rulebook states it like this:

8.3.2 Place the prefix dot 6 before a contraction when only its first letter is capitalised.

Sequences of capital letters are represented as detailed in Rulebook Sec. 8 by using either the capitals word indicator or the capitals passage indicator. The latter indicator is used whenever the only letters in three or more consecutive symbols-sequences are capital letters. However, the symbol-sequences may contain any number of non-alphabetic symbols. A capitals passage is always terminated by the capitals terminator. (See Sec. 8.5.5 for the special treatment of capitals passages which extend over multiple paragraphs or other text elements.)

The capitals word indicator is used to represent a sequence of two or more adjacent capital letters in situations where the capitals passage indicator can't be used. The capitals word indicator, in contrast to the capitals passage indicator, is terminated implicitly by any non-alphabetic symbol including a space. An explicit capitals terminator is only required to end the scope of a capitals word indicator in those situations where a small letter immediately follows the sequence of capital letters.

The need to use the capitals passage indicator complicates print to braille translation because of the need for looking ahead to determine whether it is appropriate. There also are occasional situations where there is more than one option for capitalizing the braille translation of a portion of the print text. Rulebook Sec. 8.8 provides guidelines for choosing the option intended to best facilate reading the braille.

As for backtranslating UEB braille to print, the capitalization indicators don't present any special difficulties over and above the general need for keeping track of which of the various indicators are active, applying their effects, and checking for possible impicit termination of the word-scoped indicators.