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- Contraction Tables
- ------------------
-
- Files with names of the form *.ctb are contraction tables, and with names of
- the form *.cti are contraction subtables. They are used by BRLTTY to translate
- character sequences on the screen into their corresponding contracted braille
- representations.
-
- A contraction table consists of a sequence of entries, one per line, which
- define how character sequences are to be represented in braille. UTF-8
- character encoding must be used. White-space (blanks, tabs) at the beginning of
- a line, as well as before and/or after any operand, is ignored. Lines
- containing only white-space are ignored. If the first non-white-space character
- of a line is "#" then that line is a comment and is ignored.
-
- The format of a contraction table entry is:
-
- directive operand ... [comment]
-
- Each directive has a specific number of operands. Any text beyond the last
- operand of a directive is interpreted as a comment. The order of the entries
- within a contraction table is, in general, anything that is convenient for its
- maintainer(s). An entry which defines an entity, e.g. class, must precede all
- references to that entity.
-
- Entries which match character sequences are automatically rearranged from
- longest to shortest so that longer matches are always preferred. If more than
- one entry matches the same character sequence then their original table
- ordering is maintained. Thus, the same sequence may be translated differently
- under different circumstances.
-
-
- The Characters Operand
- ----------------------
-
- The first operand of a character sequence matching directive is the character
- sequence to be matched. Each character within the sequence may be:
- * Any single character other than a backslash or a white-space character.
- * A backslash-prefixed special character. These are:
- - \b The backspace character.
- - \f The formfeed character.
- - \n The newline character.
- - \o### The three-digit octal representation of a character.
- - \r The carriage return character.
- - \s The space character.
- - \t The horizontal tab character.
- - \u#### The four-digit hexadecimal representation of a character.
- - \U######## The eight-digit hexadecimal representation of a character.
- - \v The vertical tab character.
- - \x## The two-digit hexadecimal representation of a character.
- - \X## ... (the case of the X and of the digits isn't significant)
- - \# A literal number sign.
- - \<name> The Unicode name of a character (use _ for space).
- - \\ A literal backslash.
-
-
- The Representation Operand
- --------------------------
-
- The second operand of those character sequence matching directives which have
- one is the braille representation of the sequence. Each braille cell is
- specified as a sequence of one to eight dot numbers. A dot number is a digit
- within the range 1-8 as defined by the standard braille dot numbering
- convention (see README-DOTS). The special dot number 0, which may not be used
- in conjunction with any other dot number, means no dots.
-
-