Research
How many braille pages will my book be?
The question is usually put as a ratio: so many braille pages to a print page. No single ratio is right, and the arithmetic shows why.
A ratio hides the one number that actually varies, which is how full the print page was.
The real question has a real answer, and it does not need a quote. It needs a page size, a piece of text, and a layout engine that lays the text out instead of dividing.
Why dividing does not work
The obvious method is to translate the text, count the cells, and divide by how many cells a page holds. It is obvious, it is arithmetic, and it is wrong by a wide margin, because braille does not reflow the way a screen does.
A braille line stops at the last whole word that fits and wastes the cells between there and the margin. Every paragraph opens two cells in. A running head takes a line off every page. None of that survives a division.
| Method | Lines | Pages | Against the real figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cells divided by line length | 2,152 | 90 | 34.6% short |
| Cells plus the spaces between words | 2,813 | 117 | 14.5% short |
| Laying the text out | 3,283 | 137 | — |
Both shortcuts undercount, and the better of the two is still 14.5% short. On a novel that is 20 pages of braille nobody budgeted for.
Corrected 14 September 2026. These figures were first measured before this site's translator followed the rules for words standing alone, for quotation marks, for be, were, his and was beside punctuation and for punctuation that could be read as a contraction, and before its shortform list was corrected. They have been re-run over the same text with the current translator: the words per page are unchanged, the Grade 2 cells went from 85,831 to 86,071 and the lines from 3,272 to 3,283. On 4 October 2026 the layout was changed to translate each paragraph whole instead of one word at a time, which is the only way to tell a closing quotation mark from an apostrophe; that added one cell to each grade, 120,501 and 86,072, and moved no line. The earlier claim that two other novels came within three per cent of this one did not hold when they were measured again, and the measured figures now stand in its place.
The method
- Question
- How many braille pages does a given amount of English prose become?
- Compared against
- Nothing — this is a measurement, not a comparison. The page follows the BANA Braille Formats defaults: 40 cells by 25 lines, one line given to a running head, paragraphs indented two cells.
- Over
- The body text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, body text — 26,439 words, 143,942 characters of ordinary narrative English.
- Published as
- /data/alice-body.txt — Project Gutenberg eBook #11, from Chapter I to the line before “THE END”, with blank lines between paragraphs kept single. Every figure below reproduces from it exactly with the current translator, re-run on 4 October 2026.
How far one book carries was measured on two more. Laid out the same way, Pride and Prejudice — /data/pride-body.txt, Project Gutenberg eBook #1342 from its first chapter, with the illustration captions of that edition taken out — fits 199.5 words on a contracted page, 3.4% more than Alice. Frankenstein — /data/frankenstein-body.txt, eBook #84 from its first letter — fits 205.4, which is 6.4% more. So 193 errs low, and a page count estimated from it runs that much high.
The three books are close in cells to a word — 3.26, 3.33 and 3.30 in Grade 2 — and far apart in paragraph length: 33, 57 and 95 words to a paragraph. Every paragraph ends on a short line and opens two cells in, so the book with the fewest paragraphs fills its pages best.
Until 11 October 2026 this page gave 2.0% for Pride and Prejudice. That count had laid out the edition's 154 illustration blocks, captions and copyright lines, as if they were the novel.
The result
| Grade 1 | Grade 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 26,439 | 26,439 |
| Cells | 120,501 | 86,072 |
| Lines | 4,215 | 3,283 |
| Pages | 176 | 137 |
| Words per page | 150 | 193 |
| Cells per word | 4.56 | 3.26 |
So a page of contracted braille holds about 193 words of ordinary English, and an uncontracted one about 150. Multiply your word count by 0.1242 to get lines, divide by 24 to get pages — or paste the text into the estimator, which lays it out properly.
What Grade 2 actually saves
Contracted braille is usually described as saving about a quarter to a third, which is true of cells and not of paper.
| In | Saving |
|---|---|
| Cells | 28.6% |
| Lines | 22.1% |
| Pages | 22.2% |
The saving in cells is larger than the saving in paper, and the gap is the line-end waste. Shortening the words does not shorten the ragged edge at the end of every line — if anything it leaves slightly more of it, because a shorter word is likelier to fit in a gap the previous line could not use.
That gap is 6.6 percentage points between what the contractions do to the text and what they do to the shelf. Grade 1 versus Grade 2 covers when the trade is worth making at all.
Why no single ratio works
A print page is not a fixed amount of text. Take 250 words for a double-spaced manuscript page, 275 for a trade paperback and 325 for a mass-market paperback: at those densities the ratio is between 1.3 and 1.7.
A ratio of three needs 580 words on the print page and a ratio of four needs 773, against 250 to 325 at the three lighter settings. The descriptions of those settings are rough guides, not measurements.
| Print page | Words | Braille pages per print page |
|---|---|---|
| Manuscript, double spaced | 250 | 1.3 |
| Trade paperback | 275 | 1.4 |
| Mass-market paperback | 325 | 1.7 |
| Dense or double column | 700 | 3.6 |
The estimator takes a print-page count directly and lets you change the assumption, because it is the one number in this that is genuinely yours and not braille's. The other measurements cover the reference tables, contraction positions and shortform endings.
What this cannot tell you
- Volumes. The formats standard leaves the maximum size of a volume to the agency sponsoring the transcription, and asks that a volume end at a logical break in the content, which it puts above keeping volumes the same size (BANA Braille Formats (2016) §1.6.1). Where those breaks fall is a property of your document, not of braille.
- Anything that is not prose. Tables, poetry, drama, textbooks and anything with numbered exercises carry formatting rules that change the line count substantially. This measurement is narrative paragraphs.
- Transcriber's notes and apparatus. A real transcription adds a title page, a transcriber's note, page-change indicators and often a contents list. None of that is in the text you hand over.
The finding, as a card
The number and what it is measured on, in one picture.
