as others have said the correlation between the 3 dimensional
reproduction techniques and fax is something a technologically
illiterate journalist would come up with.

There are several such processes, all of which take hours rather
than the seconds of current braille production technology and all
of which require equipment that costs tens of thousands of
dollars.

Some of these techniques may, some day, lead to the ability to
reproduce objects on an inexpensive one-off basis, and possibly
to make replacement parts for things more easily than now.
However the reduced cost for these technologies that has been
promised for years doesn't seem to be here yet.

Objects made by these processes are entirely composed of the
plastic, I have never seen reference to adding plastic to an
existing material like paper.

As for ink jet printers, that's been done with marginal success,
making really good braille dots requires very much more ink than
those machines were designed to put out, and the dots are not as
uniform as braille requires.  Others are, I think, working on
improved such ideas.  As for conical dots, if you've ever felt
braille from an embosser that's breaking through the paper, think
about dots with little points that'd scratch your little blind
hapters all to heck <Groan>

It is surprising how little variation in dot conformation and
size makes a huge difference to braille's readability.
         Let's hope the desk top publishing nerds never think of
braille fonts or proportional spacing, yuck.


As for patents, I hereby disclose the idea of braille fonts and
proportionally spaced braille so that no one will EVER do it with
out my permission, and that ain't for sale. <GRIN>
tom Fowle


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