This site mourns the untimely passing on June 22, 2009 of our dear friend and colleague, Professor Eitan Gurari of Ohio State University. Dr. Gurari was an unusually kind and generous person who cared deeply about the current high cost and long turnaround times required to produce quality braille transcriptions. He had spent many years developing software to reduce this high cost and to make existing electronic technical documents instantaneously available in Nemeth braille.

At the time of his death, Dr. Gurari had been scheduled to make a presentation at TUG 2009 about his forthcoming, free, open source print-to-braille transcribing system which could handle both EBAE and Nemeth. Here is the abstract he had submitted:

SuBrl: A LaTeX to braille converter: A first look at a forthcoming system

SuBrl is a system under development for translating LaTeX and XML data into braille. The presentation will demonstrate the translation of LaTeX and XML into braille, describe the architecture of the system, discuss issues that require special attention in LaTeX and XML sources, and argue the benefit of a LaTeX front end for braille production.

This new system utilizes Dr. Gurari's world-famous TeX4ht application for accurate conversion of documents encoded in any flavor of TeX or LaTeX to HTML/MathML and incorporates numerous specialized capabilities needed for print-to-braille conversion.

The TeX Users Group (TUG) has posted a profile of Dr. Gurari's life and technical interests in their Interview Corner and is hosting a new TeX4ht mailing list and up-to-date information about the application. Please note that involvement by volunteers is welcomed.