Pluggable Braille compiler with a normalized intermediate representation.

brailix compiles source documents into the two things a reader's hands can use:

• Braille — prose, mathematics and music, emitted as Unicode braille, BRF for an embosser, a dot array, or a laid-out page.
• Tactile graphics — an SVG or a figure spec, rasterized into an embossable BMP, PNG or PDF, or into a preview for a refreshable display.

Both take the same route through a normalized IR: source, semantic IR, output-domain IR, encoded output. The core package has zero third-party parser dependencies — install only the adapters you need as pip extras:

pip install brailix              # core: plain text, Markdown, MusicXML, SVG tactile graphics
pip install brailix[zh]          # Chinese: segmentation + pinyin (light, offline)
pip install brailix[zh,latex]    # + LaTeX math
pip install brailix[ja]          # Japanese: kana + kanji readings (light, offline)
pip install brailix[hanlp,g2pw]  # accurate Chinese engines (download models)
pip install brailix[docx]        # Word .docx / .docm (incl. MathType / OMML)
pip install brailix[graphics]    # import an existing bitmap as a tactile figure

Tactile graphics are part of that zero-dependency core: SVG parsing and BMP / PNG / PDF writing are standard library, so a figure drawn as SVG or described as a spec compiles with nothing extra installed. The graphics extra is only needed to bring an existing bitmap (PNG, JPEG, ...) in as a figure, which needs an image decoder.

The hanlp and g2pw backends download their model weights on first use. HanLP's go into a local models/ directory that brailix points it at; g2pW uses its own library's cache location.

Installing brailix puts a brailix command on your PATH (also available as python -m brailix):

brailix "我在重庆。" -p cn_current                  # Unicode braille to stdout
brailix --file lesson.md --width 32 -p cn_current  # wrap a Markdown file at 32 cells
brailix "123" --to brf -o out.brf -p cn_current    # NABCC bytes for an embosser
brailix --list-profiles                            # the names -p accepts

-p / --profile names the braille standard to translate into. It is required — more than one standard ships and the choice is always yours — except for the --list-* flags, which just print what the build supports.

See the command-line guide for the full reference.

The music subsystem accepts several score sources. Only MusicXML is free of third-party deps; MIDI and ABC need optional extras:

MIDI import goes through partitura, whose quantization and voice-splitting are heuristic. For best results, clean up a MIDI file in a notation editor (MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale) and export MusicXML before compiling.

Full docs are in docs/:

• Getting started — install and translate your first text.
• Command-line interface — translate from a terminal with the brailix command.
• API reference — the Pipeline, result objects, IR, and renderers; generated from the source.
• Extending brailix — add an engine, format, renderer, profile, or language.
• Development — set up, run the tests, and the project conventions.
• Architecture — the pipeline, the intermediate representations, and the adapter pattern.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.