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How do I represent Unicode characters with Braille blocks? You can encode ASCII characters, but what about Unicode? I didn't see any scheme to represent Unicode character in Braille.

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    Braille characters are defined in Unicode in a block called 'Braille Patterns' (U+2800..U+28FF). See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille_Patterns. But your question is unclear to answer further: Encode from where to where? From the keyboard, in computer code, into a document? Please update your question.
    – Jan Doggen
    Aug 8, 2013 at 11:11
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    The question seems to be rather clear: how do I map Unicode characters to Braille symbols. (The Braille Patterns block in Unicode is just a way to represent the Braille symbols as coded characters, and it says nothing about their meanings.) The answer is complicated. Aug 8, 2013 at 14:40

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There is no concept of Unicode in Braille. In that sense Braille is similar to old 8-bit code pages which represented different symbols in different languages for the same symbol code. For example means Q in English and Ч in Russian Braille.

So the answer is there is no way to represent Unicode in Braille on character-to-character basis. Technically you can of course translate Unicode sequences like U+025B to ⠠⠥ ⠼⠚⠃⠑⠠⠃ and this way you can represent any Unicode character, but I think that's not that you want.

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The Braille alphabet varies by language. The original Braille system was developed for French, and later different variants have been developed for other languages to meet their different character repertoires. These systems can be extended in different ways, but there is no international standard on it, probably no national standard either. In each system, the vast majority of the over 100,000 Unicode characters has no Braille rendering.

There is a compilation of information about different Braille systems in use, downloadable in PDF format at World Braille Usage.

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Converting plain text (Ascii or Unicode) to braille is a subtle and complex issue. Braille patterns are not letters in the traditional sense, so there is not always a direct one-to-one mapping of character to braille pattern. Depending on the language/alphabet of the script being translated (and in some cases the context of use), you can have multiple alphabet characters represented by one braille block, or one alphabet character represented by multiple braille blocks. The meaning of each block can also vary significantly from one language or alphabet to the next.

As Jan Doggen mentioned there is a section of standard Unicode that represents all braille block patterns (U+2800..U+28FF).

An example of the complexities involved; you can see some of the special case contractions of letter combinations in US Grade 2 braille here, within the code of the open source liblouis braille translation library:

https://code.google.com/p/liblouis/source/browse/trunk/tables/en-ueb-g2.ctb?spec=svn971&r=971

If you need to translate some text it would be best to use a pre-existing translator or code library:

http://libbraille.org/translator.php

http://alasdairking.me.uk/brailletrans/

https://code.google.com/p/liblouis/

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