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 third.
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 more than a third 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. Laid out the same way, Pride and Prejudice fits 3.4% more words on a contracted page and Frankenstein 6.4% more, so an estimate made from a word count runs that much high for books like those two, whose paragraphs are longer.
| Grade 1 | Grade 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 26,439 | 26,439 |
| Cells | 120,501 | 86,072 |
| Cells per word | 4.56 | 3.26 |
| Lines | 4,215 | 3,283 |
| 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
This is usually asked as a ratio, and no single ratio is right. Suppose it were three or four braille pages to one print page.
Run it backwards. Three braille pages need 580 words on the print page, and four need 773. A page of 250 to 300 words is 1.3 to 1.6 braille pages, not three. Apply a ratio of three to such a book and you will budget for about 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. So rather than quote one number, here is the ratio computed at five densities from 250 words to 900, by the same layout the rest of this page uses. The description beside each density is a rough guide, not a measurement: count the words on one of your own pages for a better figure.
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 | 4.7 |
In Grade 2 the table runs from 1.3 to 4.7 braille pages for one print page, and the only thing that changes is how many words the print page holds. Headings, tables and lists add to it, because each takes braille lines of its own.
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
- 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
BANA Braille Formats (2016) §1.6.1 says a braille volume should end at a logical break in the content — the end of a unit, part, chapter or section — and that this matters more than keeping the volumes the same size. It leaves the maximum size of a volume to the agency sponsoring the transcription. So there is no page number this tool could divide by honestly; ask the transcribing agency what its maximum is.
Questions and answers
How many braille pages will my document be?
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, with words wrapped whole and paragraphs indented.
Why can you not just divide the print page count?
Because a braille line ends where the next word will not fit, and the leftover cells are simply blank. An indented paragraph gives up two more cells at the front, and the running head takes a whole line off every page. Over a book that adds up.