Hi. I think Dave might be partially wrong about his explanation of .brf
files. First, I know of several cases of .brf only with no other
formats. Look at the Left Behind books for kids. Second, I think it would
be next to impossible to create a DAISY file from .brf because the majority
of the formatting is thrown away. As far as I've seen, and at least from a
validator's prospective, the software does not do any back-translating and
the volunteer isn't expected to either. My understanding has been that
either .brf files should be sent to an embosser or loaded into a
notetaker. I don't recall where I read this, but one of the bookshare.org
documents says that, in cases where both DAISY and .brf exist, the .brf was
made by software from the plain text and may have translation errors. The
general, unspoken policy seems to me that .brf should not be submitted
because they are much more difficult to work with for validators.
Also, premit me a short rant. As most of you know, embossers and note
taking devices are very expensive. When one is forced to use a .brf file
only, they're being left out if they don't have one of those devices or,
heaven forbid, they can't read Braille. In a perfect world, every blind
person would have such a device and would be born knowing Braille, but that
won't happen. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need a service like
bookshare.org anyway.
Now, permit me to counteract some of the above. There are a few programs
which translate or back-translate files. Most are commercial such as
Duxbury, but there is at least one which is free and works reasonably
well. It is NFBTrans. The main fault with it is that it still runs in
either a DOS box or under Linux. Someone was working on a Windows
interface but I haven't followed it in a couple of years. While NFBTrans
is very good at actual Braille translation, it still makes little errors
when reversing the process. It was not intended to be a back-translator
but turned into one as time went by. It is an all volunteer effort so the
translation tables aren't perfect. However, I've processed tons of NLS
files with it and it works very well. Sorry, but I don't have links for
it. You can try winnfbtrans.org or something like that but I don't think
that's right.
Briefly getting back to the Left Behind kids novels, those .brf files were
from a Braille transcriber and were specifically designed for an
embosser. I would much rather have scanned copies in DAISY. One thing I
really like about DAISY is how simple it is to convert to plain text,
Braille, html, or other formats. You just don't have that flexibility with
.brf.