Ute Lutzenberger from ProTak explanes how to prepare an E-‘Book for reading on a braille display in stand-alone mode comfortably.
Introduction
To be able to read E-books with any braille display – no matter whether it has got an internal E-book conversion or not – I convert E-books to Braille files. First of all I convert E-books to DOCX to keep basic formatting information such as headings and paragraphs by using the Calibre software.
Installing Calibre
Go to www.calibre.com. Download and install the software.
Automating the conversion process
To convert EPUB files we use the command line converter of Calibre with the appropriate parameters. For this purpose let’s create a CMD file called “epub2docx”:
Go into your “Documents” folder.
Use the context menu to Create a new text file and name it “epub2docx.cmd”.
Open the context menu of the file and choose the “open with notepad” option.
Now paste the following contents into your CMD file:
@echo off
setlocal
path =%path%;”c:\program files\calibre2″
ebook-convert %1 .docx
endlocal
Save and close the file.
Copy the file and paste it into your Calibre folder:
C:\Program Files\Calibre2
Open the context menu of the newly inserted file.
In Windows 11 you now have to select the “show more menu items” option.
Choose the item “create new shortcut”.
Select the newly created shortcut and cut it into your clipboard.
Open the run dialogue and type
shell:sendto
Confirm with Enter.
Insert the shortcut from the clipboard into the sendto folder.
Open the properties dialogue of the newly inserted shortcut.
Tab to the “run in” field and make sure that it’s empty.
Leave the dialogue with the OK button.
Converting E-Books from EPUB to DOCX
Go into the folder where the E-book is located and make sure that it’s highlighted.
Open the context menu.
In Windows 11 you now have to select the “show more menu items” option.
Open the “Send to” submenu and choose your new “epub2docx” link.
As a result you will now have a new word document in the same folder as your E-book where the “epub” ending is replaced with “docx”.
Open the Word document and make sure that you can read the text. Sometimes there are some Characters that need to be replaced.
Convert to Grade 2 Braille
Finally use your favorite Grade 2 Braille translator to convert the Word document to Braille. I use the German RTFC software (www.rtfc.eu) that has got a Word plugin for the purpose. There I have created a special profile that serves my needs to read Braille documents with a Braille display.