Tool
How many braille pages?
Paste a document, give a word count, or work from the print pages you already have. The count is laid out the way it would actually be embossed — words wrapped whole, paragraphs indented, a line given up to the running head — rather than cells divided by line length, which understates it by about a fifth.
Nothing you paste leaves this page. Or skip it and type a word count below.
Fills the word count from your page count
Used when the document box is empty
BANA §1.7.1 maximum
BANA §1.7.1
Format
Why not just divide
A braille line ends where the next word will not fit, and the leftover cells are simply blank. Over a whole book that adds up: the same text that fills 26.2 cells of an average forty-cell line is being charged forty cells of paper. An indented paragraph gives up two more at the front, and the running head takes a whole line off every page.
Dividing total cells by line length ignores all of it and comes out roughly a fifth short. This lays the words out instead, one line at a time, and counts what is actually there.
The figures below are the same layout run over a real book rather than a formula: the body of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 26,439 words. Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein came out within three per cent of it, which is why one book is enough to carry the estimate when you only have a word count.
| Grade 1 | Grade 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 26,439 | 26,439 |
| Cells | 120,461 | 85,831 |
| Cells per word | 4.56 | 3.25 |
| Lines | 4,214 | 3,272 |
| Braille pages | 176 | 137 |
| Words per page | 150 | 193 |
Grade 2 cuts the cells by 29% and the pages by only 22%, because a shorter word does not always shorten a line — sometimes it just leaves a wider gap at the margin. Any estimate that reports the two as the same number has divided rather than laid the text out.
Braille pages per print page
The transcription trade answers this with a rule of thumb: figure three to four braille pages for every print page. It is the number every agency quotes, and it is a textbook figure that gets applied to everything.
Run it backwards. Three braille pages needs 582 words on the print page, and four needs 776 — a dense double-column page, not a novel. A trade paperback carries 250 to 300 words to the page, which is nearer one and a half braille pages, not three. Use the rule of thumb on a novel and you will budget for twice the paper you need.
The ratio is not really a property of braille. It is a property of how much text your print page happens to hold, and that varies by more than a factor of four across ordinary books. So rather than quote one number, here is the ratio computed at each density, by the same layout the rest of this page uses.
How the per-word figures were measured sets out the method, and what dividing cells by line length gets wrong.
| Words on the print page | Grade 1 | Grade 2 |
|---|---|---|
| 250 — manuscript, double spaced | 1.7 | 1.3 |
| 275 — trade paperback | 1.8 | 1.4 |
| 325 — mass-market paperback | 2.2 | 1.7 |
| 700 — dense or double column | 4.6 | 3.6 |
| 900 — very dense | 6.0 | 4.6 |
Transcription agencies are not wrong, they are answering a different question. The material they are quoted on is mostly educational — textbooks, worksheets, tests — where a page carries far more text than a novel does, and where headings, tables and lists each take braille lines of their own. The same sources that give three to four also say a first-grade reader may be one to two, and a three-column index in a high school textbook may be twelve to fifteen. The spread is the real answer.
What this does not count
The number above is body text. A finished transcription is longer, and the difference is not a rounding error:
- a braille title page, and a transcriber's note page where one is needed
- a table of contents, which in braille is often several pages
- print page-change indicators running through the text
- tables, poetry, plays and lists, each with margins of their own that use more lines
- images, which become a described alternative or a tactile diagram
Braille books are split into volumes for weight rather than page count, and BANA §1.6.1b is explicit that a volume should end at a logical break in the content — a chapter or a part — and that this matters more than making the volumes the same size. So there is no page number this tool could divide by honestly. Ask the transcribing agency; they will have a house maximum.