Grade 1 braille
Grade 1 braille (uncontracted braille) maps each letter, digit, and punctuation mark to its own cell, one character at a time. H-e-l-l-o produces 5 cells. Grade 2 braille adds contractions (br for brother, ed for education) that shorten long prose but distort technical text, names, and code. The encoding here is Grade 1 only.
Supported input: Latin letters a–z (upper and lowercase), digits 0–9, and common punctuation — period, comma, exclamation mark, question mark, colon, semicolon, apostrophe, hyphen, slash, and parentheses. Other characters, including Greek, Cyrillic, and emoji, are skipped. The input pane shows a warning listing which characters were dropped.
The 6-dot cell
Each braille cell is a 2-column, 3-row grid of 6 dot positions, numbered 1–6 from top to bottom, left column first. The pattern 1-4 means dots 1 and 4 are raised; the other four are flat. Rendered in Unicode: ⠉ (the letter c).
The Unicode braille block (U+2800–U+28FF) covers all 64 possible 6-dot patterns. Each codepoint is a bitmask: bit 0 is dot 1, bit 5 is dot 6. The blank braille space, U+2800 (⠀), has no dots raised.
Capital and number indicators
Grade 1 braille has no uppercase letter cells. A capital indicator (⠠, dot 6 only) placed before a letter cell marks the next letter as uppercase. Turn it off in the options when case does not matter.
Digits 0–9 share dot patterns with letters a–j: 1 uses the same cell as a (⠁), 2 uses b (⠃), and so on, with 0 sharing the j pattern (⠚). A number indicator (⠼, dots 3–4–5–6) before the first digit opens number mode; a space closes it.
Dot notation
Dot notation replaces each braille cell with its raised dot positions separated by hyphens. The letter h (⠓, dots 1, 2, 5) becomes 1-2-5. Spaces appear as ·. Cells are separated by spaces, making word boundaries visible as gaps between · and the next group.
Use this output to verify which dots are raised without a braille-aware font, or as input for embossers that accept dot notation directly.
Decode
Switch to Decode mode and paste Unicode braille characters (U+2800–U+28FF). Capital indicators restore uppercase letters; number indicators signal digit sequences. Non-braille characters pass through unchanged. Cells outside the supported maps return ?.
Batch mode processes each non-empty line independently in both directions.