Liblouis

louis-rs Release 0.3.0

2026-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Version 0.3.0 of louis-rs, the from-scratch Rust reimplementation of liblouis, is now available on crates.io.

Where it stands. 98.6% of the liblouis test suite passes — some 2.2 million assertions, forward and backward combined. All but one of the 458 table files under tables/ compile.

What works today:

Translation in both directions, full multi-stage pipeline: correct before the main stage, pass2–pass4 after.
Contractions and the whole word family, word, begword, midword, endword, midendword, prfword, sufword, partword, begmidword with their before/after class constraints.
match and context rules through a purpose-built regexp VM that compiles patterns at table load and matches in linear time.
Braille indicators: number sign, capitalisation at all three tiers including caps passages, letter sign, nocontract, and the generic begmode/endmode family.
Emphasis: begemph/endemph and the word/symbol tiers.
Computer braille as a full pipeline feature — comp6, compbrl, begcomp/endcomp.
Backward indication for capsletter, begcapsword/endcapsword, numsign/nonumsign and the no-contract family.
Position mapping: inputPos, outputPos and cursorPos, composed across every pipeline stage in both directions.
Hyphenation natively: liblouis .dic files parsed directly, no external crate, no conversion step.
Display tables as a pipeline stage, --display on the CLI.
Translator::with_search_path for host applications that manage their own table locations.
A CLI: parse, translate, trace, check, query.

Care for a taste test? louis trace shows every rule that fired, in order, with the stage it fired in:

$ export LOUIS_TABLE_PATH=/usr/share/liblouis/tables
$ louis trace en-us-g2.ctb "Mother's Day"
⠠⠐⠍⠄⠎⠀⠠⠐⠙
┌───┬────────┬────┬──────────────────┬───────┐
│   │ From   │ To │ Rule             │ Stage │
├───┼────────┼────┼──────────────────┼───────┤
│ 1 │        │ ⠠  │ capsletter ⠠     │ Main  │
│ 2 │ mother │ ⠐⠍ │ always mother ⠐⠍ │ Main  │
│ 3 │ 's     │ ⠄⠎ │ endword 's ⠄⠎    │ Main  │
│ 4 │        │ ⠀  │ space   ⠀        │ Main  │
│ 5 │        │ ⠠  │ capsletter ⠠     │ Main  │
│ 6 │ day    │ ⠐⠙ │ always day ⠐⠙    │ Main  │
└───┴────────┴────┴──────────────────┴───────┘

louis check runs your YAML specs, --summary gives a per-file table, and louis query finds tables by language and grade.

Security. This release fixes three findings from Shielder’s security audit for OSTIF: a stack overflow on a crafted include chain, exponential blowup on nested quantifiers in match/context patterns (the engine is now a linear-time Pike VM), and a panic on double negation. Worth noting that all three are logic bugs — stack depth, algorithmic blowup, an unhandled case — rather than the memory corruption that the C implementation’s CVEs keep coming back to.

Python. Leonard de Ruijter has written PyO3 bindings: liblouis/louis-py.

What it isn’t yet. This is not a 100% replacement for liblouis yet. The library API is not stable. No C ABI. partialTrans and compbrlAtCursor/compbrlLeftCursor aren’t implemented. Back-translation returns text but not typeform. Have a look at the parity report for the remaining issues, if you want somewhere to start contributing.

Installation:

cargo install louis-rs

The source is at liblouis/louis-rs, licensed LGPL-2.1-or-later.

Liblouis Release 3.39.0

2026-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

A lot of dedicated work by Bue, Tiago, Clive, Leonard, Anthony, Andrey, Dimitar, Danil Kostenkov, Dmitriy Lazarev, Christian Comaschi and Seeing Hands went into this release, and as always Bert did a lot of the work that holds it all together. It adds braille for Haitian Creole and for Māori, the latter following the policy of the Braille Authority of New Zealand Aotearoa Trust, which also brings new tables for English text in New Zealand. The Portuguese grade 1 table has been thoroughly overhauled, the English grade 3 table gained more than 5000 new hyphenation patterns, and the Russian tables gained mathematical braille definitions as well as the last of the grade 1 contractions. The Bulgarian, Italian and Biblical Hebrew tables all back-translate considerably better than before, and the UEB grade 2 shortforms have been cleaned up, which also makes the compiled table smaller. On the technical side several memory safety issues were fixed, building with clang and MSVC on Windows works again, and the spacing parameter of the translation functions has been deprecated.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

Bug fixes

Fix several memory safety issues:
- an output->length underflow and buffer overflows in the grouping pass actions, thanks to Kevin Valerio;
- a null pointer dereference in resolveSubtable when the table search path is unavailable, thanks to Anthony Tibbs;
- undefined behaviour from incompatible function pointer casts in metadata.c, thanks to Yvonne.
- a stack-buffer-overflow in compileRule when compiling a replace rule with a malformed dots operand, thanks to Darren Carreras.

Braille table improvements

Add Russian mathematical braille definitions in ru-math.uti, following the Russian "System of Symbols for Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Astronomy" (Bykov et al., 1982), thanks to Danil Kostenkov and Andrey Yakuboy.
Complete the Russian grade 1 contracted table with the optional contractions of Table VIII and additional ё combinations, thanks to Dmitriy Lazarev.
Add a Haitian Creole uncontracted table, thanks to Seeing Hands. The punctuation and mathematics rules it shares with French are factored out into fr-bfu-comp6-puncs-math.uti.
Implement the policy of the Braille Authority of New Zealand Aotearoa Trust for Māori text, thanks to Clive Lansink and James Bowden.
General update of the Portuguese grade 1 table, thanks to Tiago Casal. Many back-translation fixes, 6-dot computer braille, Unicode braille, and support for Greek, Russian, Hebrew and Esperanto letters, along with a large number of new mathematical and currency symbols.
Improvements to the English grade 3 table, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Fixes to the Thai tables, thanks to Christian Egli: the AfterAeSpell swap in th-g2.ctb was missing the dot pattern for ง, and an unused swapdd rule in th-g1.uti used a multi-cell dot pattern in its search operand, which is not allowed.
New forward and backward exceptions for Hungarian braille input, thanks to Attila Hammer.
Improvements to the back-translation of the Biblical Hebrew tables, thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
Fixes to the UEB grade 2 table, thanks to Anthony Tibbs:
- the back-translation rule for whereabouts's was missing the apostrophe;
- the redundant shortform match rules are replaced by bidirectional word rules, which reduces the size of the compiled table;
- the combining macron has the correct dot pattern.
Fixes to the back-translation rules in the Italian 6-dot and 8-dot tables, thanks to Christian Comaschi.
Minor fixes to the Norwegian tables, thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Expand Russian mathematical Braille, using the Russian mathematical notation system and publication guidelines as references. Mathematical multi-cell symbols are forward-only to preserve reliable literary back-translation.
Improvements to Bulgarian back-translation and new symbols thanks to Dimitar Dimitrov
- bare cells back-translate as Bulgarian letters;
- cells after the number sign back-translate as digits;
- numeric operators are handled in numeric context: +, ,, -, *, /, =, ×, ÷, and trailing 1.;
- / is dots 34;
- –, —, and • are dots 6-36, with back-translation preferring –;
- № no longer emits a trailing blank cell;
- forward mappings are added for the wider Bulgarian Braille-viewer symbol set, including math, set notation, currencies, chess symbols, and Greek letters.

Other changes

Fix building with clang and MSVC on Windows, thanks to André Polykanine, and use the native Windows directory API under MinGW too, thanks to Sihu Hwang.

Deprecation notice

The spacing parameter of lou_translate, lou_translateString, lou_backTranslate and lou_backTranslateString is deprecated. It never worked reliably and has no known users. Pass NULL instead. API and ABI compatibility are preserved. Thanks to Anthony Tibbs.

Backwards incompatible changes

Invisible changes

Silence compiler warnings, thanks to Klaus Rettinghaus.
More test cases for the German grade 2 contraction dictionary, thanks to Marcel Fichtner.
The docker images are based on debian:bookworm instead of debian:bullseye, thanks to Attila Hammer.
Add a workflow for NMAKE, thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

en-nz-g1.utb
en-nz-g2.ctb
fr-bfu-comp6-puncs-math.uti
ht-frenchcompatibility.uti
ht-g1.utb
ru-math.uti

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.38.0

2026-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

This release is highlighted by a new Norwegian grade 3 contraction table, the result of Lars Bjørndal's work implementing the revised Braille Authority rules. The Swedish tables have been thoroughly renewed and now also cover Sami and Elfdalian. Malayalam has been updated to comply with the new Bharati Braille 2026 rules. Several security vulnerabilities were fixed, and the documentation was improved.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

Bug fixes

Fix several memory safety issues:
- a heap-buffer-overflow in back_passDoAction thanks to Justin Stitt;
- a null pointer dereference in pattern_compile_expression, a buffer overflow in _lou_logWidecharBuf, null pointer dereferences in _lou_compileTranslationRule and _lou_compileDisplayRule, a segfault in lou_compileString, and missing length validation in _lou_backTranslate, all thanks to FuzzAnything.

Braille table improvements

Major renewal of Swedish 6- and 8-dot tables, now reorganized to share common data. New tables for Sami and Elfdalian are also included, thanks to InsynScandinavia.
Updated Malayalam table with Bharati Braille 2026 rules, thanks to Jake Kyle.
Improvements to Hungarian forward and backward translation thanks to Attila Hammer.
Fix UK Grade 2 back-translation incorrectly expanding letter combinations such as bl and ac when they appear in the middle of a word, thanks to Kara Louise.
Fix a long-standing typo with begnum mt in all 5 Danish Grade 2 tables, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Add a Norwegian table for Spanish text (es-no.utb), thanks to Bert Frees.
Add a Norwegian grade 3 contraction table implementing the revised Braille Authority rules, along with missing grade 2 contractions and minor fixes, thanks to Lars Bjørndal and Hans Anton Ålien.
Replace Estonian computer braille table et.ctb with the newer et-g0.utb, thanks to Taniel Kirikal and Bert Frees.

Other changes

Updated documentation to clarify the differences between digit, litdigit and numsign opcodes, thanks to Anthony Tibbs.

Backwards incompatible changes

The table compiler now rejects uppercase virtual dots (A..~F~); only the lowercase forms (a..~f~) are valid as documented.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

es-no.utb
ovd-6g0.utb
ovd-8g0.utb
smi-6g0.utb
smi-8g0.utb
sv-6common.uti
sv-6g0d.utb
sv-6g0p.utb
sv-6g1.uti
sv-6g1d.ctb
sv-6g2.uti
sv-6g2d.ctb
sv-8g0d.utb
sv-8g0n.utb
sv-8g1.uti
sv-8g1d.ctb
sv-8g1n.ctb
sv-8g2.uti
sv-8g2d.ctb
sv-8g2n.ctb
sv-phon.uti

Renamed

None

Removed

et.ctb
- use et-g0.utb instead

Liblouis Release 3.37.0

2026-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

The nice thing about creating a release is that you get to bring in all these wonderful contributions that people have provided. This time we have new and improved braille tables for Danish, Devanagari, English grade 3, Estonian 6-dot, Hungarian, Italian 6-dot, Norwegian and UK 8-dot computer. Anthony has done incredible work to fix obscure opcode bugs. XANOY and PGZXB have patched many security problems and finally Benedict Carling has improved typeform handling for back-translation so that it is finally usable.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

The typeform buffer is now populated during back-translation. This allows applications to detect emphasis (italic, bold, underline) when translating braille back to text. Thanks to Benedict Carling of Paige Braille.
The YAML test format has a new expected_typeform field to test that emphasis in braille is correctly detected during back-translation.

Bug fixes

Both sufword and prfword now correctly recognize seqdelimiter characters as word boundaries during forward translation and respect nocontractsign during back-translation, thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Fix contraction opcode bugs when using nocontractsign thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Fix a NULL pointer dereference lou_readCharFromFile thanks to XANOY.
Fix a memory leak in parseLanguageTag when parsing invalid queries and a heap buffer overflow in syllableBreak. Both thanks to PGZXB.
Fix a stack overflow when an invalid LOUIS_LOGLEVEL string is provided and avoid a crash when the table resolver is NULL. Both thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Fix an infinite loop in isEmphasizable caused if characters mistakenly reference one another thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Fix capsword translation with endword apostrophe'd letters (e.g. AA's, FBI's) again thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Fix a heap buffer overflow in translateString when handling joinnum or joinword rules. Thanks to Christian Egli for fixing and zerojackyi for reporting it.
Various code cleanups thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix a stack buffer overflow in pattern_compile_expression and a stack buffer overflow in _lou_getTablePath when LOUIS_TABLEPATH is too long, both thanks to PGZXB.

Braille table improvements

Add a complete implementation for UK 8-dot computer braille according to the standard created by the BAUK (Braille Authority of the UK) and currently maintained by the successor organization, UKAAF thanks to Seeing Hands.
Vastly improved Italian 6-dot braille table thanks to Tommaso Nonis of Vision Dept S.r.l.
- The table has been completely redesigned, and various mathematical symbols, capitalization and punctuation were fixed.
- inputting characters from A to J no longer results in numbers being inserted instead.
- Parentheses, quotation marks, brackets and braces now display correctly
- Emphasis marks have been introduced for bold, italic and underline, allowing these to be viewed in screen reader utilities that support them.
Improvements to Norwegian thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Corrections to Danish Grade 2 thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Improvements to Hungarian forward and backward translation thanks to Attila Hammer.
Major updates to Devanagari to comply with the new Bharti Braille rules 2.1. Also support for back-translation support was added thanks to Dipendra Manocha and Jake Kyle.
Add an Estonian 6-dot braille table based on the official Estonian Braille Standard (March 2009) and Eesti punktkirja käsiraamat (2011) thanks to Artur Räpp and Taniel Kirikal.
Improvements to English grade 3 thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Other changes

None

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

The literal opcode has been removed as it was synonymous with the compbrl opcode.

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

et-6dot.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

it.tbl
- use it-it-comp6.utb instead

Liblouis Release 3.36.0

2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

This release brings various updates to braille tables, particularly for Slovakian and Norwegian in line with the respective changes to their the braille standards. There are new tables for Macedonian uncontracted braille and the long awaited table for English Grade 3 is finally here. On the technical side, there are modernized Python bindings and better support for building liblouis for environments such as Android.

I'd like to thank everyone for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

There is a new table for Macedonian uncontracted braille thanks to Kristijan Lazarev.
There is a new table for English Grade 3 thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Bug fixes

Fix a bug with having to double escape certain characters in match patterns. Escaping now works as you'd expect thanks to Christian Egli.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to Hungarian forward and backward translation thanks to Attila Hammer.
Update the Slovakian 6-dot literary table to be in line with the latest Slovak braille standards thanks to Peter Vágner and other members of the Braille Authority of Slovakia.
- Added emphasis indication for bold, italic and underline
- Fixed back translation issues
- Added additional symbols for foreign Latin alphabet characters
Norwegian Grade 2 has seen a major overhaul according to the adjustments made by the Norwegian Braille Authority thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Improve the handling of Greek letters in Norwegian 8-dot braille thanks to Lars Bjørndal.

Other changes

Fix the linking of the fuzzers thanks to Samuel Thibault.
Use "config.h" instead of <config.h> for portability thanks to Patryk Miś. This change does not affect normal autotools builds, but improves portability for alternative build systems such as CMake, Bazel, or the Android NDK.
Modernize the Python bindings thanks to Leonard de Ruijter. The minimum Python version is now 3.10. The syntax has been updated, type hints have been added and the doc strings are modernized.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

mk-g1.utb
en-g3.ctb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.35.0

2025-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

This release brings quite a few technical improvements. We've enhanced support for memory management in the API, added support for math characters in match rules, expanded the Python bindings to include metadata API support, and made it possible to set the log level via the LOUIS_LOGLEVEL environment variable.

There are also substantial updates to various language tables, including improvements to Portuguese 8-dot braille, Hebrew back-translation, Norwegian 8-dot support, UEB forward translation, and Hungarian braille. We've added support for Rokuten Kanji (Japanese Kanji Braille). Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian literary braille tables have received updates to their space handling rules, and the Danish tables have seen fixes related to typos and hyphenation.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

match rules now also support testing for math characters. Thanks to James Bowden for the idea and Bert Frees for the implementation.
Add Support for "Rokuten Kanji", the other Japanese system for Kanji Braille.
The API now contains functions to free memory that was returned by API calls. See the documentation for details. Thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
The Python bindings now support most of the metadata API, thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.

Bug fixes

ucBrl in the mode parameter now correctly works also for back-translation. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix a segfault when a StringBuffer is used before it is initialized. Thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Fix a bug in the handling of nocont in conjunction with seqdelimiter. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to the Portuguese 8-dot Braille table: Correct angle quotation mark characters used in Portugal, add missing symbols, such as Greek alphabet and double quotation mark characters used in Brazil. Also added symbols that aren't defined in the Portuguese standard but are commonly found in texts and web pages, such as bullet points, some common mathematical symbols, etc. Thanks to Tiago M. Casal.
Fix the back-translation of the Greek Sigma and other small improvements to the Hebrew table. Thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
Improvements to Norwegian 8dot thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
- Add more characters and math symbols.
- Fix a back-translation problem when two dot 6 are followed by a word.
- Fix a problem where the letter "i" is followed by number.
Improvements to UEB forward translation, in particular fixes for rarer words and some proper names. Thanks to James Bowden.
Hungarian improvements thanks to Attila Hammer.
Fix typos and hyphenations in the Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Improvements to the back translation for the Russian literary Braille table: Now, if a space is intentionally input after a comma or semicolon, a double space will not occur. If no space was input, a space will still be automatically added, as before. This change also applies to Ukrainian and Belarusian literary Braille tables. Thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.

Other changes

Hans Anton Ålien proof read the documentation and fixed quite a few typos.
The log level of the library can now also be set via the LOUIS_LOGLEVEL environment variable.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

ja-rokutenkanji.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.34.0

2025-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

This release brings significant improvements to various language tables, particularly for Classical/Biblical Hebrew where three main standards are now supported. We have a new table for Thai Grade 2 contracted braille, and substantial updates to Lithuanian braille tables. There are also improvements to Hungarian, Dutch, Norwegian, and Turkish tables. On the technical side, there's new support for building macOS universal binaries and the pre-built html and plain text documentation is no longer packaged with the released tarball.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

A new table for Thai Braille Grade 2, a contracted Braille system, has been added thanks to Chatupol Nootatong.

Braille table improvements

Hungarian improvements thanks to Attila Hammer.
Fix a bug in the Dutch table related to apostrophes after a number which are not always a minute sign. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix the metadata of the Russian 6-dot computer braille table thanks to Bert Frees and Andrey Yakuboy.
Minor improvements to the Norwegian Braille: Some small fixes regarding 6 dot, added Cyrillic alphabet and added certain new characters to 8 dot, including bullet points used by JAWS when using Liblouis for 8 dot. Thanks to Lars Bjørndal and Bert Frees.
Major changes to the Lithuanian braille tables thanks to Rimas Kudelis
- Renamed lt.ctb to lt-8dot.utb
- Both tables have been reviewed and modified.
  - The 6-dot table is now closer to the national standard issued in 2019.
  - The 8-dot table is now intended to align with the 6-dot table instead of the 8-dot standard from 2011.
  - Some whitespaces in the table files have been eliminated to make them easier to read using braille terminals.
Fixes for back-translation issues involving subscript numerals, diacritic marks, and capital letters turning into Greek letters. Makes no changes to the UEB-style cuneiform transliteration table. Thanks to Eric Harvey.
Major Expansion and Improvements to Classical/Biblical Hebrew thanks to Eric Harvey.
- Two new translation tables have been added so that the three main standards for Classical Hebrew are now available:
  1. The original International Hebrew Braille Code (hbo.utb)
  2. The system for full cantillation developed by Ray McAllister, Matthew Yeater, and Sarah Blake LaRose (hbo-cantillated.utb)
  3. The compact standard without dagesh or shewa represented in the Katz transcription manual (hbo-slim.utb)
- hbo.utb is now the table for the International Hebrew Braille Code. Before it was used for the IHBC-McCallister system (now hbo-cantillated.utb). The International Hebrew Braille Code is the most-established and widely used standard for Classical Hebrew, so it seems right to make it the basic table.
- Most of the Hebrew-specific rules are contained in .uti files, and the .utb files only add rules for uncontracted English support. Since Classical Hebrew readers usually have another first language, this allows non-English speakers to create custom translation tables with Hebrew and their first language, or for easier inclusion in multilingual tables like ancient-languages-us.utb.
- In addition to the new tables, there are improvements to the hbo-cantillated.utb table for consistency and to make sure that braille output matches that produced by Duxbury as closely as possible:
  - Ultra long vowels now contract consistently.
  - Cantillation marks no longer interrupt the contractions for ultra-long vowels (hiriq-yod and tsere-yod).
  - Holam now always renders properly as 135 and holam waw as 246.
Improvements to Turkish grade 1 and Turkish computer braille, thanks to Oğuz Uğur and Ozancan Karataş

Other changes

There is a new configure option to build macOS universal binaries thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix incorrect (non-https) link in the documentation thanks to jinwoolee.
The pre-built html and plain text documentation is no longer packaged with the released tarball. All formats of the documentation can still be built from the source and from the released tarball as explained in the README. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

hbo-cantillated.utb (formerly hbo.utb - hbo.utb was changed to follow the IHBC)
hbo-slim.utb
th-g2.ctb
lt-8dot.utb

Renamed

ru-compbrl.ctb -> ru-comp6.utb
ru.ctb -> ru-comp8.utb

Removed

None

liblouis joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

2025-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

The liblouis project and Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) are excited to announce that liblouis has joined SFC as a member project, with the goal of ensuring sustainability and a framework for long-term stewardship of the project. As a nonprofit home of liblouis, SFC will provide a home for fundraising, legal assistance, and governance that will benefit all users of the project.

As a library that is embedded in many assistive technologies including screen readers, braille displays, and on Android and iPhone mobile devices, liblouis is an essential tool for blind and visually impaired users, as it enables the translation of printed text into braille, making digital content accessible through tactile reading. By supporting braille codes for many languages, it ensures that users around the world can read books, documents, and web content in braille. This allows users to interact with computers, smartphones, and other digital devices, promoting independence, education, and equal access to information for those who rely on braille. It is licensed under the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), which means it is freely available for modification, redistribution, and incorporation into other projects.

By choosing the LGPL, the creators of liblouis have ensured that the software will always remain freely available. This was a deliberate choice to safeguard the long-term availability of braille translation tools for the blind community, ensuring that the technology would be continuously improved and adapted without proprietary barriers. The LGPL not only helps maintain a free and open-source approach but also contributes to the creation of a thriving ecosystem of accessible, assistive technologies that support independence and inclusion for all users.

Developments over the past few years, including the passing of liblouis founder and long-time contributor John Boyer, inspired the liblouis volunteers to think carefully about the future and succession of the leadership for this important project. By joining SFC, liblouis gains access to strategic advice and governance expertise to recruit new volunteers and raise funds to support work on liblouis development, as well as stable ownership of project-related assets and infrastructure.

Each SFC member project is led by a Project Leadership Committee (PLC). Each individual member of the PLC participates in their own capacity, although they may have professional or other affiliations. The founding PLC includes Bert Frees, Christian Egli, and Anthony Tibbs.

To make a financial donation to the liblouis project, use the PayPal donation button below, or visit the SFC donations page for more information on other ways to donate.

To support the Software Freedom Conservancy, please become a Sustainer.

Liblouis Release 3.33.0

2025-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

This release combines braille improvements with security enhancements. We have new tables for Coptic braille, Cuneiform transliteration and for Portuguese 6-dot computer braille. There are improvements to Dutch, Hungarian, the International Phonetic Alphabet, Norwegian and UEB. On the security side a lot of people have reported and fixed buffer overflows and other memory issues.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

None

Bug fixes

A large number of buffer overflow problems have been solved:
- Fix free error in parseQuery and analyzeTable thanks to Liu Yuwei
- Fix an overflow in passDoAction and doPassSearch thanks to Liu Yuwei
- Fixed a segfault in finalizeCharacter thanks to Christian Egli and cx104906.
- Fix a heap-buffer-overflow error in compileRule and _lou_extParseChars thanks to tyler92.
- Fix a heap buffer overflow in back_passDoAction thanks to Bert Frees and Liu Yuwei.
A doc string has been added to lou_translateString and lou_translate outlining the buffer overflow risk thanks to Christian Egli and shuangxiangkan.
Fix the default table search path on Windows thanks to Bert Frees and Bue Vester-Andersen

Braille table improvements

Fix the back-translation of capital sign in Dutch thanks to Bert Frees
Major improvements to Norwegian thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Improvements to the UEB table thanks to James Bowden. In particular the handling of words containing "somer", e.g. "Somerville" was fixed.
Hungarian improvements (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila Hammer.
Add a new 6-dot table for literary Coptic braille, thanks to Eric Harvey.
Added some missing symbols (including space) to the table for the International Phonetic Alphabet, thanks to Robert Englebretson and James Bowden.
Add a table for Portuguese 6-dot computer braille, thanks to Tiago
1. Casal and Iván Argote-Pérez. The table is based on the official
documentation in Portuguese.
Add a new table for Cuneiform transliteration. It differs from the existing table cuneiform-transliterated.utb in that it does not adopt UEB dot patterns for the various diacritic marks. Instead it uses bespoke diacritics inspired by some IPA symbols. Thanks to Eric Harvey.

Other changes

None

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

Make value in table metadata field mandatory: It makes the metadata system clearer and simpler. Empty values have not been used anyway.

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

cop.utb
cuneiform-transliterated-compact.utb
pt-comp6.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.32.0

2024-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

A lot of intense work by Matt, Paul, Leonard, Eric, Sarah and Bert went into this release. There are new tables for Biblical Language and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. We have improvements for UEB, Spanish, Turkish and Hungarian. There are also a couple of new features, for example the handling of the language metadata has been extended to handle language ranges.

I'd like to thank all the very dedicated contributors for helping to push liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

lou_translate now has an option to specify a display table. This is especially useful when using a query. Before it would just default to a Unicode display table, thanks to Christian Egli.
Meta data for language and region can now be specified using a IETF Extended Language Range. This is particularly useful for accessing tables related to a specific region, for instance. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Bug fixes

Fix a memory problem in the getTable function. Thanks to the oss-fuzz project for reporting and to Christian Egli for fixing it.
Fix a build problem on Windows related to strncasecmp which was reported at the last minute by Leonard de Ruijter and fixed by Christian Egli.

Braille table improvements

Updates to Spanish grade 1 thanks to José Manuel Delicado:
- Removed lowered digits. This allows certain punctuation to be written again.
- Included digits6Dots.uti. This prevents the numsign from disappearing.
- The symbols .{.verbatim} and ,{.verbatim} are used as numeric mode chars.
- Added the noback operator to the apostrophe symbol, since it's not very used and conflicts with the .{.verbatim}.
Extensive fixes to the UEB computer code thanks to James Bowden.
Improvements to Turkish grade 2 thanks to Oğuz Uğur and Attila Hammer.
Hungarian improvements (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila Hammer.
There is now an include table for symbols referencing the critical apparatus in critical texts thanks to Matt Yeater.

Other changes

Migrate to realloc-posix from gnulib, as realloc-gnu that we used before is now deprecated. Thanks to Christian Egli.
Improvements to the manual thanks to Huan Wu.
Thanks to Rob Beezer we now have instructions on how to install Python bindings in a virtual environment.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

If liblouis has been compiled for 16-bit Unicode it will now error if a table contains characters outside of that range. Previously it would issue a warning and ignore the problem. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

critical-apparatus.uti
he-common-consonants.uti
he-common-vowels-ihbc.uti

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.31.0

2024-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

This release adds support for new braille tables, such as Thai contracted and Greek International US, and updates existing braille tables such as the Finnish table which has been updated to the latest braille standard. Benehalo has uncovered a number of security problems in the liblouis code and has thankfully also provided fixes for them by hardening the code.

I'd like to thank all the very dedicated contributors for helping to push liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

None

Bug fixes

Benehalo discovered quite a number of security problems and kindly enough also just fixed them by adding some check guards and making the code more robust.

Braille table improvements

Hungarian improvements (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila Hammer.
The usage of match opcodes with empty pre- and post patterns, e.g. match - disk - 145-24-16 in some tables has been replaced with plain old always opcodes, as their implementation is much faster.
A change to the Spanish back-translation that went into the last release was reverted as it caused more problems than it solved.
The Dutch display table has been improved thanks to Bert Frees.
The Finnish table has been updated to reflect the latest Finnish braille standard from 2021 (Pistekirjoituksen perusteet, 2021) thanks to Sami Maatta from Celia.
Added a new Thai contracted braille table according to the guidelines of "Thai Braille Use Manual" of the National Braille Promotion and Development Fund. Thanks to Chatupol Nootatong.
Add a table for Greek International US braille. This table is based on the composed Greek characters, unlike the existing English table which is based on the decomposed system. Thanks to Sarah Blake LaRose and Leonard de Ruijter.

Other changes

None

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

th-g1.utb
grc-international-en-composed.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.30.0

2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

We are very excited to present this release, as a lot of enthusiasm and energy have gone into it. A host of of new contributors have improved liblouis and added support for new languages. We now have support for many ancient languages, like Akkadian, Ugaritic, Biblical Hebrew and Syriac. This release also supports Yiddish. And the Dutch tables got a very innovative upgrade.

I'd like to thank all the very dedicated contributors for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

There is a new uncontracted braille table for Yiddish, created by Abby Howell and Matthew Shifrin, a teacher and student of Yiddish at the Boston Worker's Circle.
A group of incredibly dedicated people has been working on support for ancient languages, namely Matt Yeater and Paul Geoghegan with the help of Sarah Blake LaRose, Eric Harvey, Leonard de Ruijter and Abby Howell. The languages that are supported so far are:
- Biblical Hebrew
- Akkadian according to Borger system
- Akkadian braille according to U.S. system
- Syriac
- Ugaritic
- A table to provide support for the languages represented in the Cuneiform / Akkadian Writing systems

Bug fixes

Fix a bug in the Python bindings that occurs on bigendian architectures, thanks to Daniel Garcia.
Fix a memory problem when handling parameters in lou_translate, thanks to benehalo.

Braille table improvements

Minor improvements to the Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen:
- Fixed a missing contraction for "gjorde".
Improvements to Hungarian (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila Hammer.
Corrections to the Malay Table thanks to lbk2907.
Major improvements to Serbian backtranslation thanks to Aleksandar Sredojevic:
- Backtranslation now works to both Cyrillic and Latin script.
Fix the metadata for the Cantonese (Hong Kong) table thanks to André Polykanine.
Improvements to backtranslation of Spanish grade 2 thanks to Iván Argote Pérez with the help of Abby Howell.
Major upgrade to the Dutch tables thanks to Bert Frees. These tables use virtual dots in an innovative way to help sighted readers better understand the generated braille. They also use a new technique using m4 macros to simplify writing tables that use many repetitive opcodes.

Other changes

The metadata now has support for unicode-range, i.e. whether the characters used in a table all fall inside the 0-U+FFFF Unicode range (ucs2), or whether some characters are in the > U+10000-U+10FFFF range (ucs4), thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

sr-Cyrl.ctb
yi.utb
hbo.utb
akk.utb
akk-borger.utb
syc.utb
uga.utb
cuneiform-transliterated.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.29.0

2024-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

A lot of hard work by Andrey, Anthony, Attila, Bert, Bue and James went into this release. We have many improvements for UEB, better support for Belarusian and Ukrainian literary braille, a major upgrade for Turkish and miscellaneous enhancements for Kannada, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto and Malay. There is also a brand new table for classical Greek for Spanish braille readers.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

There is a new uncontracted braille for Lao thanks to Aikeo Koomanivong, disability service center in Lao PDR DSC.
There is a new uncontracted braille table to read classical Greek characters according to the technical document B12-1 by the Spanish Braille Commission, thanks to Iván Novegil.

Bug fixes

None

Braille table improvements

Fixed issues with Kannada table kannada.cti thanks to Jake Kyle.
Improvements to the Belarusian and Ukrainian literary braille tables thanks to Andrey Yakuboy:
- Added support for back translation to the Belarusian and Ukrainian literary Braille tables (bel.utb and uk.utb respectively).
- Changed the dot patterns for parentheses in the Ukrainian braille table from 126-345 to 2356.
- Added new tables for Belarusian and Ukrainian braille with indication of capital letters (bel-detailed.utb and uk-detailed.utb respectively).
Minor improvements to the Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen:
- Fixed definition of dollar sign ($)
- Fixed rules for applying section sign (§)
- Fixed contraction of some words
Updates to UEB Contracted thanks to Anthony Tibbs:
- Final letter groupsigns will not be used immediately following capital indicators (e.g. when the first letter of the groupsign is capitalized, or the groupsign follows a capitalized passage) per UEB Rule 10.8.2
Updates to UEB thanks to James Bowden:
- Back translating braille dot 3 now results in the ordinary apostrophe U+0027 rather than U+2019
- Dot 5, used for "spaced digits" is only applied if a no-break space U+00a0 is used in the input. It fixes an issue with British postcodes which should be treated as two separate items. It also means that if someone wants spaced digits, numbers have to be joined together with no-break spaces deliberately.
Do not collapse Unicode braille in Dutch, thanks to Davy Kager.
Improvements to Hungarian (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila Hammer.
Added support for back-translation to the Esperanto table, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Major upgrade to the Turkish tables thanks to Oğuz UĞUR with lots of help from Attila Hammer.
- add support for accented characters
- add punctuation symbols from the Turkish Braille Writing Guideline
- fix some contractions
Corrections to the Malay Table thanks to lbk2907.

Other changes

Duplicate emphasis classes are no longer warnings thanks to Christian Egli. There are cases where emphasis redefinition is legitimate. They are simply logged now.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

bel-detailed.utb
uk-detailed.utb
lo-g1.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.28.0

2023-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

This release manages to bring as many new features, table improvements and bug fixes as we haven't seen in a long time. There are a number of major bug fixes that Bert worked on that fix bugs and inconsistencies. On the table side there is a new table for Filipino contracted braille, James has tirelessly been working on UEB improvements and (as usual) Attila worked on the Hungarian tables.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

lou_translate has a new option to specify the table to use with a query. See the updated documentation on how to make use of this new feature.

Bug fixes

Fix a bug when matching context rules that begin with uppercase letters. Thanks to Anthony Tibbs for the very detailed bug report and thanks to Bert for the actual fix.
Fix a memory corruption error in the code for the swap opcodes. Thanks to the OSS-fuzz project for reporting and to Christian Egli for fixing it.
Change how emphasis phrases are determined. Also allow non-whole words at the start and end of a phrase. This fixes a problem in the UEB handling. Thanks to Ken Perry from APH for reporting and to Bert Frees for fixing it.
Character definition and base rules are now always considered in the order in which they are defined in the table. In other words the topmost rule always wins. This fixes a number of problems and inconsistencies. Thanks to Bert Frees for the fix.
- Fix a problem with compbrlAtCursor and compbrlLeftCursor that was reported by Daniel Mayr
When a table does not define any capital marks, rules are now case sensitive thanks to Bert Frees

Braille table improvements

Improvements to UEB
- fixes to many words starting with letters "BE-".
- Fix back translation of dots 26 - when standing alone; should be the word enough.
- Fix assignment for the right double arrow and added left, up, and down double arrows.
- Fix typos in a couple of rules.
- Fix words beginning "CONS-" and "DISHD-" when written uppercase, all above thanks to James Bowden.
- Ensure letter indicators are added to letters A-J following numbers in a capitalized passage, thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Improvements to Hungarian (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila Hammer.
New table for Filipino contracted braille, thanks to Allan Mesoga and Dang Hoai Phúc.

Other changes

The manywarnigs module from gnulib is no longer used. It caused massive slowdowns when compiling with gcc.
Add the name of the concerned table when logging warnings thanks to Bert Frees for the patch and to Attila Hammer for the PR.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

The order of how character definition and base rules are considered has changed. All included tables were adapted, but if you maintain your own tables you might want to look at the change to see what you need to do.

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

fil-g2.ctb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouisutdml Release 2.12.0

2023-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

This Liblouisutdml release brings major improvements to Nemeth Math handling thanks to Attila Hammer and Norbert Markus. It also adds support for liblouis 3.27.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features

Add support for liblouis 3.27
Major upgrade to Nemeth Math handling thanks to Attila Hammer and Norbert Markus.
- The order of some character definitions and include statements have been changed so that the now updated Nemeth Braille dot patterns of mathematical symbols take precedence over the literary Braille patterns for the same Unicode characters. E.g. the horizontal ellipsis, and division sign are among those affected.
- Now the caret symbol appears with its intended Nemeth Braille dot pattern.
- The colon and semicolon as mathematical symbols appear with a punctuation prefix (dots 456-25 and dots 456-23) and a space is added after them. The space may be skipped depending on the context.
- A number of rules have been disabled to give way to the now updated Nemeth Braille dot patterns of mathematical symbols in nemethdefs.cti.
- The list of function names and abbreviations has been extended with items (e.g. two-letter abbreviations of function names and their combinations).
- Indication of subscripts and superscripts has been improved and consolidated. E.g., numeric subscripts are now either indicated or not indicated by a subscript prefix as required. However, multilevel subscripts and superscripts are not (yet) covered as it requires keeping track of the current level.
- A number sign is inserted before the first digit following a dot 5 or dots 56 (also in combinations with a minus sign) if that prefix is the first cell in the block or after a space.
- Now a single digit or letter with overbar is handled correctly. Previously a two-step rule had the side-effect of deleting dot 5 from dots 5-13-156 even when this sequence appeared as part of signs of comparison (less than or equal to, etc). Now those signs of comparison, including those for sets are correctly displayed. The solution does not yet cover letters of another alphabet or type form. Such instances are displayed using the uncontracted five-step Nemeth rule.
- Support for the contracted indication of a horizontal bar under a single digit or letter is added (dots 146-156 following the digit or letter) according to a 2013 BANA update to Nemeth Rule XIV. The solution does not yet cover letters of another alphabet or typeform. Such instances are displayed using the uncontracted five-step Nemeth rule.
- Now a Nemeth rule for repeating decimals is observed. When a series of digits have each a dot above in print to mark a repeating period, it is sufficient to show a single dot in Braille. The modification block, however, applies to all the digits affected.
- The decimal point now appears correctly (dots 46) even when preceding or following a dot five which indicates the beginning of a modification.
- A space is inserted between the Braille representation of {} for the empty set.
- The space is removed from between a grouping symbol and a horizontal ellipsis in various combinations.
- The space between a function name/abbreviation and a superscript belonging to it is removed. In case of a log and colog, a subscript is expected. Note that the current solution is far from perfect as processing function names and their surroundings could better be done by an algorithm.
- Any series of Multiple spaces in the math blocks are reduced to a single space at that place.

Other

Fix a memory leak thanks to Samuel Thibault
Add missing declarations to louisutdml.h, thanks to Peter Fordham for the report
Update gnulib

Liblouis Release 3.27.0

2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains support for two more languages, namely Thai and Romanian uncontracted braille. There is also the usual assortment of incremental improvements to Bengali, Danish, Hungarian, Swedish, Urdu and US English. To top it off, some great new contributors did some code cleanups and bug fixes.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Added support for Thai braille thanks to Chatupol Nootatong, Dr. Wiraman Niyomphol and Itsawat Banlawanich from Thai braille fund and Foundation for the Blind in Thailand.
Added a new Romanian 6 dot table, thanks to BAUM Engineering.

Braille table improvements

Update to Urdu, removing old rule where dots 256 was used for Urdu letters TEH ALEF. Thanks to Jake Kyle.
Added the dari character to Bengali thanks to Attila Hammer.
Improvements to Hungarian (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila Hammer.
Improvements to Hungarian to support users if typing physical braille display, thanks to Attila Hammer.
Fixed the translation of Unicode ellipses in US English grade 1 and 2 tables thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Added some more symbols to the Nemeth character definitions thanks to Norbert Markus and Attila Hammer.
Fixed a bug in Danish when back-translating a word contraction followed by "!", thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Improved handling of numbers and fixed a couple of whole-word contraction errors in Swedish braille thanks to Insyn Scandinavia AB.
Added the possibility to retain the virtual dots on Dutch braille, so that it should be possible to distinguish between identical dot patterns that originate from different input. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Other changes

Removed some code smell thanks to Aaron Cannon.
Duplicate emphasis class definitions now cause a warning, thanks to Attila Hammer.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

The line continuation feature was removed, as it was no longer needed and caused problems (e.g. issue 239). The tables that depended on it were updated. Thanks to Aaron Cannon.
Invalid attribute names now cause a table compilation error instead of just a warning. Thanks to Attila Hammer.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

None

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Improved security for liblouis

2023-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Fuzzing or fuzz testing is an automated software testing technique that involves providing invalid, unexpected, or random data as inputs to a computer program. The program is then monitored for exceptions such as crashes, failing built-in code assertions, or potential memory leaks (see Wikipedia article on Fuzzing).

Automated fuzz tests have been set up for liblouis for a few years now and these tests have uncovered quite a few bugs, even security critical ones.

Earlier this year the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) together with Adalogics, a well known consultancy for software security, have worked on some major improvements to the existing test coverage. The report on their work and their results can be found in blog posts from both OSTIF and ADALogic.

The work has already paid of, quite a steady stream of security related issues trickles in through the automated fuzzing. Now all that is left to do is to fix these issues.

Want to help with this? Contact us on the #liblouis channel at irc.libera.chat or the matrix channel at https://matrix.to/#/#liblouis:matrix.org

Liblouis Release 3.26.0

2023-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains one new feature, namely the possibility to mark a test as an expected failure just for back- or forward translation. On top of that we have updates for Danish, Hungarian, Norwegian and Nemeth Braille plus the usual assortment of code cleanups and bug fixes.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

The YAML syntax to define tests has been improved so that expected failures can now contain a direction attribute. In other words you can now specify whether you expect a test to fail for both directions or just for forward or backward translation. For more details consult the updated documentation on how to write YAML tests. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Bug fixes

Fix an out-of-bound write in brl_checks.c thanks to Bert Frees for the fix and to Han Zheng for the report.
Clear the display table cache on lou_free thanks to Bert Frees for the fix and to David Korczynski for the report.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to Hungarian (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila Hammer.
Changed the Danish grade 2 tables in accordance with updates from the Danish Braille committee, thanks to thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Added support for more symbols in the Nemeth braille tables thanks to Norbert Markus.
Improvements to Norwegian braille thanks to Lars Bjørndal
- Put noback before acute sign to enable input at sign (email addresses).
- Added more noback prefixes.
- Corrected leftwards arrow and added definition for left right arrow.
- Changed bullet point from 2356 to 36-36. According to the Norwegian braille standard, this is the preferred unordered list item prefix.

Other changes

Clarify the README for Python thanks to Rob Beezer.
Properly remove support for Python2 in the Python bindings again thanks to Rob Beezer.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

None

Renamed

None

Removed

None

liblouis has a new irc channel

2023-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Irc is the venerable tool to do real-time chat. Some of the liblouis developers used to hang out on a channel on the oftc network.

We now have a new channel on libera.chat were we hang out.

Come by and talk to us on the #liblouis channel at irc.libera.chat. You can use the web client for example.

Liblouis Release 3.25.0

2023-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

We dedicate this release to the memory of John Boyer, the original author of liblouis. Sadly he passed away recently. We owe him a tremendous amount of gratitude. Without him liblouis would not exist.

A lot of work has gone into this release. We have quite a few security related fixes. Then there are updates to Dutch, Norwegian, Slovenian and Vietnamese. Attila, who never seems to get tired, updated the Hungarian tables and did some general cleanups in the tables.

Also due to some mishap our domain expired and we could not re-acquire it. So we had to change our domain to liblouis.io.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Bug fixes

Fixed several buffer overflow errors in lou_setDataPath, lou_logFile and resolveSubtable thanks to Marsman1996.

Braille table improvements

Fix a deprecation warning in Bulgarian 6 dots thanks to Attila Hammer.
Fix two broken space replacement rules for ZERO WIDTH SPACE and WORD JOINER thanks to Attila Hammer and Norbert Markus.
Fixes to Hungarian Braille exceptions and hyphenation thanks to Attila Hammer. This results in a much improved back-translation of capitalized words.
Support for both 8 and 6 dot math symbols in Hungarian thanks to Norbert Markus.
Update Dutch 8-dot computer braille table to the 2022 standard thanks to Leonard de Ruijter and the Dutch Braille Authority.
There are updates to the Norwegian braille standard. Most notably URLs and email addresses are no longer surrounded by braille patterns unless present in the original document. Thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Add some missing character definitions to Slovenian computer braille, thanks to Jožef Gregorc.
Corrections and additions to Vietnamese thanks to Dang Hoai Phúc. Includes a new computer braille table.

Other changes

Change the domain name from liblouis.org to liblouis.io thanks to Christian Egli.
Simplify the Danish test to contain fewer files thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen and Bert Frees.
Add the tests and the examples of the Python bindings to the distribution tarball. Thanks to Rob Beezer for spotting this oversight.

Deprecation notice

The lou_setDataPath and lou_getDataPath functions have been deprecated. Please migrate to one of the other ways to set the table search path:
- The recommended and most straightforward way to set the search path is to set the LOUIS_TABLEPATH environment variable.
- You can also set a custom table resolver function through lou_registerTableResolver.
- If you use the metadata based query API and haven't set the LOUIS_TABLEPATH environment variable, you can use the lou_indexTables function to tell Liblouis which files (not directories) to search.
- Finally, there is the fallback solution of using absolute file paths.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

vi-cb8.utb (replaces vi.ctb)

Renamed

None

Removed

vi.ctb (replaced by vi-cb8.utb)

Liblouis Release 3.24.0

2022-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains major updates to Hungarian, UEB, and Chinese bopomofo braille. Danish has been completely reworked and there is now support for the Danish braille standard 2022. There are also some new tables so that liblouis can now generate Georgian computer braille, Swahili (Kenya) and Chichewa (Malawi). Aside from that there is the usual assortment of code cleanups and bug fixes.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

Braille table improvements
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

Braille table improvements

New grade 1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and 2 tables for Swahili (Kenya) and grade 1 table for Chichewa (Malawi) thanks to Jake Kyle, Dipendra Manocha and Martin Kieti.
Improvements to Hungarian thanks to Attila Hammer.
Update braille patterns of some Chinese characters and phrases in the Chinese bopomofo braille table thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan.
Add experimental Georgian computer braille table thanks to Harris Mowbray and Mariam Mikiashvili.
Updated the Danish tables to the new 2022 Danish braille standard thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
- Limited contraction level (grade 2l or 1.5) is no longer part of the Danish braille standard 2022.
- There is no longer any need for "literary" tables. In Danish braille, capital letters are now always indicated, and steps have been taken in the standard to ensure better back-translation.
- As requested by The Danish Braille Committee, the tables for the 1993 standard will be kept as an option for at least a year. All the 1993 tables have been renamed to include "~1993~" in the filename, so the new tables will be used as default.
Improvements to UEB thanks to James Bowden.
- Add new sign for German sharp S (ICEB July 2022)
- Fix a couple of acronyms which require grade 1 indicator (LLB, LLP)
- Fix placement of numeral sign in letters comma digits
- Review rules for "under" and "there" contractions

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

sw-ke-g1-2.ctb
sw-ke-g1-3.ctb
sw-ke-g1-4.ctb
sw-ke-g1-5.ctb
sw-ke-g1.utb
sw-ke-g2.ctb
ka.utb
ny-mw.utb
The following files now all refer to the corresponding tables for Danish braille 2022:
- da-dk-g08.ctb
- da-dk-g16.ctb
- da-dk-g18.ctb
- da-dk-g26.ctb
- da-dk-g28.ctb
- da-dk-octobraille.dis

Renamed

The old Danish tables for the now deprecated 1993 standard have been renamed to include "1993" in the filename:
- da-dk-g08.ctb -> da-dk-g08_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g16.ctb -> da-dk-g16_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g16-lit.ctb -> da-dk-g16-lit_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g18.ctb -> da-dk-g18_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g26.ctb -> da-dk-g26_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g26-lit.ctb -> da-dk-g26-lit_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g26l.ctb -> da-dk-g26l_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g26l-lit.ctb -> da-dk-g26l-lit_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g28.ctb -> da-dk-g28_1993.ctb
- da-dk-g28l.ctb -> da-dk-g28l_1993.ctb
- da-dk-octobraille.dis -> da-dk-octobraille_1993.dis

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.23.0

2022-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains significant updates to many existing braille tables (Chinese bopomofo, Hungarian, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, UEB grade 2 Ukrainian). On top of that it also contains new tables for Chinese Common Braille Scheme, Kinyarwanda and Luganda thanks to Cary-Rowen and Jake Kyle. Behind the scenes Samuel Thibault has been working tirelessly to fix memory related bugs.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

None

Bug fixes

Fix a problem in the parsing of faulty unbalanced context expressions. Thanks to Samuel Thibault.
Fix a buffer overflow problem when output.length is larger than input.length. Thanks to Samuel Thibault.
Fix an endless loop in the handling of computer braille. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Remove computer braille from Japanese Kantenji as it is not part of the standard. Thanks to Kensaku Yoza.
Bring Swedish tables up to date with the latest standard published by Punktskriftsnämnden (the Swedish Braille Authority) in 2009. The table for uncontracted braille was replaced and new tables for (partially and fully) contracted braille have been added. Thanks to David Renström from Insyn Scandinavia AB.
Improvements to Hungarian (added more exceptions) and migration to the nonumsign opcode thanks to Attila Hammer.
Fixed a bug in the Ukrainian table that led to wrong translation of some uppercase letters. Thanks to Andrey Yakuboy and Bert Frees.
Augment the UEB grade 2 tables to resolve an ambiguity between lower groupsigns and punctuation at the beginning of words by placing a letter sign at the front of punctuation. This resolves an ambiguity between, for example, "discount" and ".count". Thanks to Krzysztof Drewniak.
Add a new table for Chinese Common Braille Scheme which is a type of braille used for spelling Mandarin Chinese. It is a variant of the Chinese Current Braille System but has more perfect marking rules and produces less ambiguity than the latter. For more information see the comments in zhcn-cbs.ctb. Thanks to Cary-Rowen and Frank.
Updates to the Chinese bopomofo braille table thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan:
- Update braille patterns of some Chinese characters and phrases
- Add braille patterns for various Greek symbols
- Add "Math rules" section and the mixed number rule
- Add braille patterns for ☐ (⣏⣀⣹), ☑ (⣏⣿⣹), and ☒ (⣏⣭⣹)
New table for Kinyarwanda braille thanks to Jake Kyle from Compass Braille.
New table for Luganda braille thanks to Jake Kyle from Compass Braille.
Improvements to the Russian contracted braille table thanks to Andrey Yakuboy:
- Now prefixes "из" and "без" are correctly contracted before hard sign (ъ).
- Fixed a contraction for word "кое-где", now it is contracted according to rules.
- Other minor fixes and improvements.

Other changes

None

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

zhcn-cbs.ctb
lg-ug-g1.utb
rw-rw-g1.utb
sv-g0.utb
sv-g1.ctb
sv-g2.ctb

Renamed

None

Removed

Se-Se-g1.utb

Liblouis Release 3.22.0

2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

This is a major release. On the Braille tables side there is a new table for German grade 2 with capitalization and there are updates to the Dutch, German Hungarian, Punjabi, Russian, UK Braille Computer Notation and Slovak tables. Christian added a new opcode to indicate the end of a number where the number doesn't end at a space character. Last but not least Samuel, Martin and Han have put a lot of work into checking for and fixing memory problems.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Add a new opcode nonumsign that helps with indicating the end of a number when it doesn't occur at the end at the end of a word such as '123abc' for example. For more details see the documentation. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Bug fixes

Prevent a memory overflow in compilePassOpcode thanks to Martin Gieseking. This was reported in CVE-2022-26981 and should now be fixed.
Prevent processing of characters beyond the string end in parseChars thanks to Martin Gieseking.
Prevent an invalid memory writes in compileRule. Thanks to Han Zheng for reporting it and to Christian Egli for fixing it.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to German braille:
- Improve handling of single letters in grade 2 thanks to Mischa Künzle.
- Improve handling of emphasis thanks to Bert Frees.
- Add a table for grade 2 with capitalization thanks to Christian Egli.
Fix a problem with Ñ in Dutch braille thanks to Paul Rambags
Updated Slovak Braille table to be inline with the 2021 Slovak braille usage guidelines.
Fixed a problem with the '+' symbol in UK Braille Computer Notation thanks to Mario Arias.
Major improvements to the Hungarian braille tables thanks to Attila Hammer.
Make Punjabi table to behave the same as Duxbury in forward translation and more reliably than Duxbury in back translation. Thanks to Jake Kyle.
Improvements to the Russian and other Cyrillic tables thanks to Andrey Yakuboy:
- Now all Russian based tables return braille Unicode braille by default when forward translating, no need to include ru-unicode.dis manually.
- French letters (æ, ë and ï) have been added to the Russian literary braille table.

Other changes

Integrate sanitizer tests in the CI pipeline and fix a large number of memory problems (leaks, overflow and undefined behavior) thanks to Samuel Thibault.
Removed the "experimental" label from the functions lou_indexTables, lou_findTable, lou_findTables, lou_getTableInfo and lou_listTables (the meta data query API).
Fix a build problem when using Clang 11 on macOS thanks to Robert Scott.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

de-g2-detailed.ctb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Emacs mode for editing liblouis tables

2022-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Good news for those of you who are editing liblouis tables using Emacs. There is now a liblouis mode that helps by providing syntax highlighting and other helper functionality.

Installation

The mode can be installed from melpa using M-x package-install. It automatically opens all files that contain the following magic line (which most tables contain):

# liblouis: <...>

en-ueb-g1.ctb for example contains

# liblouis: Unified English Braille Code (Grade 1)

Usage

Just open a liblouis table file with Emacs and you should have syntax highlighting. Also M-x compile should run lou_checktable on the currently opened liblouis table.

There is also support for parsing the output produced by the liblouis test suite so that you can easily navigate to problems in the YAML files when using compilation-minor-mode in the test-suite.log.

History

The mode is not all that new. It was part of the liblouis distribution for a long time. What is new is that it has been simplified, moved to a separate repository and added to melpa, the Emacs Lisp Package Archive so that it could easily be installed from within Emacs.

Liblouisutdml Release 2.11.0

2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

This minor Liblouisutdml release adds support for liblouis 3.20 and up.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features

Add support for liblouis 3.20

Other

Add Lithuanian hyphenation table

Liblouis Release 3.21.0

2022-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

This release sees major updates for Hungarian and German. The Swiss Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Print Disabled has agreed to upstream their tables and Attila Hammer has adapted Hungarian to the latest standard. A bug in numeric mode was fixed which should it make more useful for languages other than UEB. Finally there are fixes for Norwegian and Danish.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

New table for German 6-dot computer braille thanks to the Swiss Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Print Disabled

Bug fixes

When numeric mode was enabled, i.e. when a table contains any of the numericmodechars, midnumericmodechars or numericnocontchars opcodes, contraction was automatically disabled. This is required for UEB but not necessarily so for other braille systems (as mentioned in issue 615). This has now been changed so that contraction is only disabled if the nocontractsign has been defined. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Braille table improvements

Fixed emphasis, section sign and dash between numbers in Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Correct latin small letter sharp s in Norwegian thanks to Lars Bjørndal and Dawn Renouf Bjørneby.
Major improvements to German Braille thanks to the Swiss Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Print Disabled
- Improvements to emphasis handling in German tables and greatly extended test coverage.
- All the improvements from the tables formerly known as bidi tables were merged in the main tables and are now used by both tables. The bidi tables have been renamed to "detailed". Essentially the detailed tables provide capitalized Braille which helps with the back-translation.
- Upstream all improvements from the sbs-braille-tables.
Improvements to the Hungarian tables thanks to Attila Hammer.
- Improved back-translation, notably of words containing special consonants like "szsz" or "ssz".
- Extended the Hungarian grade 1 "braille input" (back-translation aided by special extra dot patterns).
- Implemented latest update to the Hungarian braille standard (for example the characters "\" and "|" were changed).

Other changes

Make autogen.sh work on MacOS, thanks to Ken Perry

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

de-comp6.utb

Renamed

de-g0-bidi.utb -> de-g0-detailed.utb
de-g1-bidi.ctb -> de-g1-detailed.ctb

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.20.0

2021-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

This is a major release. Not only in terms of table additions and updates but also in the way the tables are written. Bert has replaced the uplow opcode with a more generalized base opcode. This clears up the path for a more generalized handling of emphasis and uppercase characters. In the course of this simplification some bugs with computer braille were discovered and fixed.

On the Braille tables side there is a brand new table for braille kanji and there are major updates to the Polish, Chinese, Russian literary and the UEB tables.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

There is an experimental new feature that allows a table writer to write table macros. This feature is disabled by default. Macros are a helpful tool for refactoring, however as it stands the feature is not mature and might disappear in future releases.
Add a new opcode base that associates a character with another already defined character. Think of it as a generalized form of uplow. A typical use of this opcode is for defining a pair of letters, a lowercase and the corresponding uppercase.

Bug fixes

Fix a problem with the dot 7 capitalization indicator in computer braille thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

New table for Kantenji (or "braille kanji", a Japanese braille system) thanks to Kensaku Y.
Improvements to Polish literary braille table thanks to Łukasz Golonka.
- use correct representation of indexes for squared, cubed etc.
- use correct representation for fractions
- change symbol used for underscore from dots 46 to 6
- add U+2212 minus symbol (also to computer braille table)
Updates to the Chinese braille table (zh-tw.ctb) thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan.
- Complete translation of CJK Radicals Supplement
- Change the default braille pattern of '蛤' to ⠗⠜⠂
- Correct the default braille pattern of many Chinese characters
- Add various Chinese phrases involving exceptions of braille patterns
- Add a math symbol '◊' (⠫⠓)
Improvements to the Russian literary (uncontracted and contracted) braille thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
- If the dot sign ('.') is after digits at the beginning of a string, the braille dot 6 isn't inserted between the last digit and the dot. This is necessary for items' numbers of numbered lists.
- Back translation for French letters has been disabled because of conflicts with punctuations.
- Back translation for Latin (mostly English and German) letters has been improved.
- The definition of the 7/8 fraction (U+215E) has been fixed.
- Placement of spaces around math symbols has been improved according to the Russian braille rules.
- The apostrophe sign ("'") and the right tick sign (u+2019) are displayed correctly if they're in the end of a word (English, for example).
- New contractions have been added and minor bugs have been fixed in the Russian contracted braille table.
New display table (ru-brf.dis) has been added. It adds support of Braille ASCII for Russian and other Cyrillic tables. Thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
Improvements to UEB thanks to James Bowden.
- Fixed placement of numeric indicator in letters dot numbers.
- Added more mathematical symbols.
- Added the four new allowed shortform extension words.
- Improvements to words starting with "dis(h)" and "cross(h)".
Implement alphabet change indicator in Dutch braille thanks to Bert Frees.

Other changes

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

The uplow opcode has been removed and replaced with the more general base opcode.

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

ru-brf.dis
ja-kantenji.utb
latinUppercaseComp6.uti

Renamed

None

Removed

ru-ru.dis
cs-letterDef8Dots.uti
ru-chardefs.cti
nl-g0.uti
nl-BE-g0.utb

Liblouis Release 3.19.0

2021-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

For this release Bert Frees has been hard at work to clean up the code base. He fixed a few bugs one of which was causing memory corruption. Others have contributed corrections to braille tables or even provided new tables. For example there are now tables for Tshivenda and for Russian contracted braille.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

Bug fixes

Fix a bug in the uplow opcode thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix a possible crash due to memory corruption thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

The Norwegian 6 dots braille tables now correctly handles signs like section sign ('§' and '§§'), as well as numbersign ('#') before numbers. In addition the letters a with acute, o with tilde, n with long right leg and thorn are redefined. Phrases with capitals only are know handled correctly. All thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Fix a problem with 'ç' in Northern Kurdish thank to Imam Kahraman and Christian Egli.
Add support for back translation in Russian literary braille thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
In Russian literary braille, if the letters 'Ё' and 'Й' consist of two code points, they are displayed correctly.
Add new Russian contracted (grade 1) table thanks to Andrey Yakuboy and Ekaterina Anisimova.
Update to Urdu, mostly to cater for spelling variations found in source text. Thanks to Jake Kyle.
New contracted braille table for Tshivenda created by Christo de Klerk at the request and under the auspices of the South African Braille Authority.
Fix in Arabic computer braille table thanks to Ikrami Ahmad:
- back-translate 256 to Latin full stop
Fix translation of URLs and file paths in Polish grade 1 table, thanks to Łukasz Golonka.

Other changes

Fix the build script for Microsoft nmake thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

Major refactoring of compileTranslationTable.c thanks to Bert Frees. Thanks to these changes a few bugs were found and fixed in the code and a few tables.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

ru-ru-g1.ctb
ve-za-g1.utb
ve-za-g2.ctb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis mourns the loss of Mike Gray

2021-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

We were deeply saddened to hear of the death of Mike Gray. He was absolutely instrumental in the implementation of UEB in liblouis.

Many of his ideas and his code code contributions will live on in liblouis.

Liblouis Release 3.18.0

2021-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

This release brings support for many new languages: There is support for six new languages from South Africa, Northern Kurdish, Kazakh, Tatar, Yakut, Bulgarian literary braille and finally Khmer, Burmese and Vietnamese. Aside from that there are also major improvements to Afrikaans, Russian literary braille, Uzbek and Hebrew Computer Braille.

I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

Bug fixes

Don't silently ignore the last line of a table when it doesn't end with a new line character. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

New contracted braille table for the isiXhosa and isiZulu languages created by Christo de Klerk and Laurent Cadet de Fontenay at the request and under the auspices of the South African Braille Authority.
New contracted braille table for the Sesotho, Setswana and Sepedi languages created by Christo de Klerk at the request and under the auspices of the South African Braille Authority.
New braille table for Northern Kurdish thanks to Imam Kahraman.
Fix a problem with ']' in Finnish 8 dot braille thanks to Christian Egli. The real problem was an unintended continuation line.
Major update to the grade 2 Afrikaans table. It now implements the new Afrikaans rules adopted and implemented recently by the South African Braille Authority. The rule changes simplify and rationalize the rules, especially those based on pronunciation. 571 of the list of 25912 test words were impacted by the changes and all have been corrected.
Improvements to the Russian literary braille tables thanks to Andrey Yakuboy and Bert Frees:
- Fixed a bug in ru-litbrl-detailed.utb that was causing a capital sign to be missing for Cyrillic uppercase letters after Latin letters.
- Fixed a bug in ru-litbrl-detailed.utb that was causing a number sign to be missing in some cases.
- Added more accented letters
New tables for Kazakh uncontracted, Tatar uncontracted and Yakut uncontracted braille thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
Added more apostrophe symbols to English Computer Braille Code table thanks to BAUM Engineering.
Small fix to Italian computer braille thanks to Simone Dal Maso
New table for Bulgarian literary braille thanks to Румяна Каменска.
Fixes to Uzbek grade 1 thanks to BAUM Engineering.
- capital sign for Roman numbers
- signs (math, parentheses and other)
- sh and ch inside a word
- g and o with different accent marks
Major overhaul of the 8 dot Hebrew Computer Braille table thanks to Adi Kushnir
- Fixed Hebrew input to properly work. It did not work at all before.
- Added Russian support
- Added special European characters
- Fixed Arabic support.
- Fixed some symbols to comply with the Israeli standard for computer Braille.
- Changed display name from Israeli Multilingual to just indicate Hebrew.
New tables for Khmer, Burmese (contracted and uncontracted) and Vietnamese (uncontracted, partially and fully contracted, as well as a variant for Southern Vietnam) thanks to Dang Hoai Phúc.

Other changes

Brilliant simplification of the table parser internals thanks to Bert Frees

New, renamed or removed tables

New

kk.utb
sah.utb
tt.utb
xh-za-g1.utb
xh-za-g2.ctb
zu-za-g1.utb
zu-za-g2.ctb
nso-za-g1.utb
nso-za-g2.ctb
sot-za-g2.ctb
tsn-za-g2.ctb
bg.utb
kmr.tbl
vi-vn-g0.utb
vi-vn-g1.ctb
vi-vn-g2.ctb
vi-saigon-g1.ctb
my-g1.utb
my-g2.ctb
km-g1.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

he.ctb -> superseded by he-IL-comp8.utb
vi-g1.ctb -> superceded by vi-vn-g1.ctb

Liblouisutdml Release 2.10.0

2021-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Liblouisutdml 2.10.0 has been released. This minor release improves the documentation and improves the build and test infrastructure. It also adds support for liblouis 3.17.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Other

New features

Add support for liblouis 3.17

Other

Improve the documentation thanks to Norbert Márkus
New Dockerfiles to cross-compile using mingw thanks to Christian Egli

Liblouis Release 3.17.0

2021-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

This release stands in the tradition of small incremental improvements that make it another fine and solid release. Andrey Yakuboy put in a lot of work to improve Russian literary and computer braille. He also provided a new table for Belarusian uncontracted and computer braille. Aside from that there are numerous improvements in Braille tables such as French, Polish and Urdu. The documentation has been improved as has the table meta marking the tables whether they are geared towards forward or backwards translation. I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

Braille table improvements
Other changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

Braille table improvements

The backtranslation of æ in French 6 dot braille has been fixed thanks to André-Abush Clause.
The definition of the vertical line symbol (|) in the Russian computer braille table was corrected thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
Improvements to the Russian literary braille thanks to Andrey Yakuboy:
- Letters which are used in Old-Russian texts were added.
- Arrows, integrals and other symbols were added.
- the horizontal bar symbol (u+2015) was added and marked as a dash-symbol.
- Now accent marks are put before a letter according to the Russian braille rules.
- Many bugs with processing space-symbols were fixed.
- Improvements to processing dialogs and direct speech.
- Improvements to processing letters of different alphabets.
New tables for Belarusian uncontracted and computer braille thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
Various fixes to Polish tables thanks to Łukasz Golonka:
- Add em dash to both computer and literary Polish tables
- Remove some definitions which made it impossible to back translate quoted strings from the Grade 1 table
- Fix back translation of capital M and add tests for back translation of all Latin capital letters for Grade 1 table
Update to Urdu thanks to Jake Kyle:
- Revised definitions of SUPERSCRIPT ALEF and ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM.
- Changed contractions of ٹھ, ان, اِن, بے, بی, اَور and اور.
- Dots 3-3 used for repeated words instead of 6-6.

Other changes

Fixed some valgrind issues thanks to André-Abush Clause.
Improve the documentation of caps opcodes thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Add meta data to all tables indicating whether a table is geared towards forward or backwards translation or both. Again thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

bel.utb
bel-comp.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.16.1

2020-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

In the frenzy to ship the 3.16.0 release a little mishap slipped in. The test suite contains an error and consequently doesn't pass. It was promptly discovered and fixed by Samuel Thibault. So we present to you the real, hopefully fixed 3.16 release. Let’s name it 3.16.1.

Liblouis Release 3.16.0

2020-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

This release is mostly the work of Bert Frees. He has put in a lot of work and pushed some major improvements with regards to how emphasis is handled (and how this is documented). He fixed a crash when reading URLs using computer braille. He also worked with many contributors to get their improvements in. So we have better support for UEB, Dutch, Urdu, Malayalam, Arabic, Bashkir, Uzbek, Russian computer braille and for EBAE. I'd like to thank everybody for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

A new opcode noemphchars was added. This gives you more control over the placement and scope of various emphasis indicators. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Bug fixes

Fix an endless loop when using compbrlAtCursor thanks to Bert Frees

Braille table improvements

Improvements to US EBAE conformance with BANA emphasis guidelines thanks to Benetech.org
Fixed a problem with apostrophe in Malayalam thanks to Jake Kyle
Improvements to contraction use in UEB thanks to James Bowden. In particular the checkmark (U+2713) is added, the emdash (U+2014) is fixed, the right single quote used as apostrophe between letters is fixed and finally some more accented letters have been added.
Improvements to Urdu Braille and Malayalam thanks to Jake Kyle
Add characters for Bashkir and Uzbek languages to the Russian computer braille table. Thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
New table for Bashkir uncontracted braille thanks to Rustam Churagulov and Gabidullin Yunir.
Updated < and > symbols in the Arabic tables thanks to Ikrami Ahmad.
Improvements to Dutch thanks to Bert Frees.
- Every word part in a capitalized compound word counts in the length of a passage.
- begcapsphrase is allowed to start in a word preceded by punctuation.
Improved translation of ligatures in UEB thanks to Bert Frees.
Multiple improvements to the Russian literary braille thanks to Andrey Yakuboy and Bert Frees:
- Many new symbols (punctuation, bullets, math symbols, etc) have been added.
- The table now includes the international phonetic alphabet table.
- Punctuation after digits and fractions is now marked with dot 6 to avoid ambiguities.
- Other changes to conform better with Russian braille rules.
- A new table that indicates capital letters was added. This is the new recommended Russian table for braille display users.
- Removed the old ru-ru-g1.utb in favor of ru-litbrl.ctb and ru-litbrl-detailed.utb.

Other changes

Support for Python 2 has been removed. The python bindings now only support Python 3. The deprecation notice was announced in Release 3.13 and the removal is finally done now.
Improvements to the placement of emphasis and capital indicators.
The documentation for the emphasis opcodes has been further improved thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

emphmodechars can and must now be set per emphasis class.

Invisible changes

The emphasis and capitalization handling code has seen major streamlining, simplification and tidying thanks to Bert Frees.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

ba.utb
ru-litbrl-detailed.utb
en-us-emphasis.uti

Renamed

None

Removed

ru-ru-g1.utb

Liblouisutdml Release 2.9.0

2020-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

This Liblouisutdml release fixes a couple of bugs and adds support for liblouis 3.15.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Other

New features

Add support for liblouis 3.15

Bug fixes

Fix a buffer overflow thanks to Samuel Thibault
Fix a typo in make_makefile.c thanks to Arend Arends
Fix a few bugs in the windows make file generator thanks to Christian Egli

Other

Improvements to the help screen thanks to Sebastian Humenda
Fix some math test cases thanks to Christian Egli

Liblouis Release 3.15.0

2020-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains updates to the Afrikaans, Malayalam, Malay, Israeli, classical English and Portuguese tables. It also contains a new table for Coptic thanks to first-time contributor Ibraam Nasif. Behind the scenes there have been major changes to the cross-compilation tool-chain that will finally allow us to ship pre-built windows binaries that contain lou_checkyaml.exe.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

None

Bug fixes

None

Braille table improvements

New computer braille table for the Coptic language thanks to Ibraam Nasif from Coptic Bishopric of Youth
Improvements to Afrikaans thanks to Christo de Klerk
- Fixed correct handling of the ŉ character (0x149)
- Prevent contraction of
  - "self" in "selfoon", "selfone",
  - "ui" in words and names like "quisling", "quidproquo", "quiëtis", "Quinten", "Quintus",
  - "er" in words like "konstituering".
Improved table for Malayalam grade 1 thanks to Jake Kyle.
- Fixed rules for Candrakkala character at the end of a word.
- Fixed rules for letters ര മ ങ in certain contexts.
- Improved back-translation.
Improvements to grade 2 Malay braille thanks to Herbert Koh.
Improvements to Israeli 6-dot thanks to BAUM Engineering.
- Fixed number sign for Arabic digits.
- Fixed Hebrew letters with dagesh.
Added bullets to the classical English tables, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen
Improved Portuguese grade 1 thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
- Fixed forward translation of &, <, >, `, ¶ and '.
- Improved back-translation. The table is now tagged as going both forward and backward.
- Added missing square root sign.

Other changes

None

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

Major rework of the cross-compilation tool-chain. There are now Docker images that should allow for local builds of binaries for 32 and 64 bit. These include the libyaml library so the binaries contain lou_checkyaml.exe. This will allow table creators to test their changes locally under windows.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

cop-eg-comp8.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis maintainers receive Google Open Source Peer Bonus

2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Google Open Source has announced their 2020 first quarter Google Open Source Peer Bonus winners, and the liblouis maintaines Bert Frees and Christian Egli are among the recipients!

The program has been active since 2011 and “rewards external open source contributors nominated by Googlers for their exceptional contributions to open source”.

Congratulations to Bert and Christian & all the other winners for this well-deserved recognition!

Liblouis Release 3.14.0

2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains major updates to Arabic, Dutch 8-dot computer braille, German, Russian computer braille, Ukrainian computer braille and Uzbek. Also there are new tables for Israeli multi-language Hebrew/Arabic/English braille and Malay. Aside from that there have been many code cleanups and bug fixes.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Add new test mode in lou_checkyaml for testing display tables. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Bug fixes

Work around a bug that causes an endless loop in French uncontracted braille thanks to André-Abush Clause.

Braille table improvements

Updates to the Russian computer braille table thanks to Andrey Yakuboy:
- Fixed diacritics, Greek letters and Hebrew.
- Added new Cyrillic letters.
- Fixed several minor bugs.
New table for Uzbek braille thanks to BAUM Engineering.
New table for Ukrainian computer braille thanks to Andrey Yakuboy and Oleh Shpai.
Improvements to Arabic thanks to Ikrami Ahmad and Mada, Qatar Assistive Technology Center.
- Added a lot of new symbols (algebra, geometry, Greek, etc.) to the grade 1 table.
- Changed some symbols for less conflicts with grade 2.
- Implemented letter sign / grade 1 indicator to cancel numbers and inhibit contractions when in grade 2.
- Updated 8-dot computer braille table for better (easier to memorize) presentation of basic math symbols and punctuation marks.
- Improved back-translation.
Improvement to German thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
- Removed superfluous letter sign before certain lesser-used accented letters.
Final version of Dutch 8-dot computer braille table thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
New Israeli multi-language Hebrew/Arabic/English tables for both uncontracted and computer braille. Thanks to BAUM Engineering and Erez Kugler from TSR Gaash.
New table for grade 2 Malay braille (Malaysia) thanks to Herbert Koh.

Other changes

You can now use up to 256 noletsign characters in a table, thanks to Christian Egli.
Major improvements to the documentation for the Standing Alone Sequences and their related opcodes such as seqdelimiter and also clarifications regarding the begcaps and endcaps opcodes thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Deprecation notice

The class opcode has been deprecated in favor of attribute, which has been enhanced to do everything class can do.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

uz-g1.utb
ar-ar-g1-core.uti
ar-ar-math.uti
he-IL.utb
he-IL-comp8.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

da-dk.dis: This table has long been superseded by da-dk-octobraille.dis.
da-lt.ctb: This table was a step on the way to defining a Danish 8 dot standard. The table was referring to an old Danish Braille note-taker from the 80s and 90s, which is not used any more.
fi1.ctb and fi2.ctb: These tables are obsolete. Use fi-fi-8dot.ctb instead.

Liblouis Release 3.13.0

2020-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

A tremendous amount of work by lots of different people has gone into this release. Bert Frees for example added new opcodes, fixed long standing bugs (with emphasis and capitalization), made the documentation more clear and helped table contributors bringing in their improvements. Bue Vester-Andersen added major improvements to Danish and German braille. This release also contains much improved tables for Afrikaans, Russian computer braille, Urdu and Chinese.

On a personal note I'd like to say that this is the 20th release of liblouis shipped by the current release team Bert Frees and Christian Egli. I hope we can continue to do so.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

The nocross opcode has been made into a prefix opcode, which means that it can now be used in combination not just with the always opcode but also with other translation opcodes such as begword, e.g. nocross begword sh 146 for example. The old usage of the opcode no longer works, see Backwards incompatible changes.
Added a new opcode rependword, needed to implement Malay braille. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Emphasis and capitals can now be marked correctly in more cases. Thanks to Bert Frees.
- When begemphword (begcapsword) is defined but not endemphword (endcapsword), use emphletter (capsletter) to mark every character in an emphasized (capitalized) part that ends in the middle of a word.
- When begemphword (begcapsword) and begemph (begcaps) are both not defined, use emphletter (capsletter) to mark every emphasized (uppercase) letter.
- capsnocont has no influence anymore on whether capsletter is used for every uppercase letter or not, see Backwards incompatible changes.

Bug fixes

Fix a crash on sparc64 thanks to Samuel Thibault.
Fixed a bug where the inputPos array was not monotonically increasing. This is a problem for language bindings that try to do hyphenation based on this information. Thanks to Bert Frees.
A couple of small Coverity fixes thanks to David King.
Fix an infinite loop involving multipass rules and backtranslation thanks to Bert Frees and Bue Vester-Andersen.
Fix several problems in the Python bindings thanks to Leonard de Ruijter, Łukasz Golonka and André-Abush Clause:
- Ensure that the mbcs encoding is always used to encode file path on Windows, especially when 'Unicode UTF-8' feature is enabled.
- getTypeformForEmphClass was passed a decoded string on Python 3 instead of an encoded one.
- The same applies to compileString. We encoded the input string, but never used that encoded one when passing it to liblouis.
begemphword (begcapsword) and endemphword (endcapsword) are now used for single letters within a word when emphletter (capsletter) is not defined.
For backward translation the returned input length is now equal to the initial input length (as it is for forward translation) thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to Afrikaans thanks to Christo de Klerk
- Fixed back translation of some lower words.
- Fixed several contraction errors where contractions are based on pronunciation or occur where compound words join.
- Eliminated grade 1 indicator where a single letter follows a single apostrophe to indicate an abbreviated word, e.g. 'k for ek.
- Corrected the use of the grade 1 indicator in grade 2 with signs which would conflict with contractions, such as the trademark sign that would conflict with the contraction of tussen.
- Fixed the back translation conflict between the UEB circle shape indicator and words containing $= being the contraction for "alge".
Improvements to Russian computer braille table thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
- The table is now based on the Unicode character set. A lot of new characters were added that aren't in KOI8-R, including Greek, Hebrew, accented letters and so on.
- For special characters we now follow the definitions from other software (JAWS, TSS, DBT) instead of following the American standard.
Improvements to Urdu Braille thanks to Jake Kyle
- Changed definition of \x0624 (Waw with hamza above) from dots 1256 to dots 3-2456 following advice from proof reader.
- Added 2 character versions of letter plus diactric (previously only the one character versions defined):
Updates to the Danish Tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen:
- Fixed back-translation for some JAWS Braille drivers, which deliver Unicode characters to Liblouis as input from a Braille keyboard.
- Ensured proper use of letsign in connection with accented letters.
- Re-arranged and strengthened tests to include all Unicode characters defined in the tables.
Updates to the Chinese braille table (zh-tw.ctb) thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan, Coscell Kao and Victor Cai.
New experimental German tables for grade 0 (Basisschrift) and grade 1 (Vollschrift) that are more suitable for back-translation, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
- All capital letters are marked.
- Accented letters are translated using de-accents-detailed.cti to make the translation as detailed as possible.
- Apostrophes and single quotation marks are translated the same.

Other changes

The documentation for the emphasis opcodes has been reworked and is now much more clear and accurate thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice

Python 2 is no longer maintained since the beginning of this year. The current liblouis Python bindings work with both Python 2 and 3. However the support for Python 2 will be dropped in the next release (3.14) at the beginning of June 2020. If you have code that uses the liblouis Python bindings with Python 2 then please refer to the official porting guide for help with migrating it.

Backwards incompatible changes

Since the nocross opcode has been made into a prefix opcode, it must now be used in combination with another opcode. For example nocross sh 146 must now be written as nocross always sh 146.
The capsnocont opcode can not be used anymore to control whether capsletter is inserted for every uppercase letter. This now depends on whether begcaps and begcapsword are defined.

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

de-g0-bidi-core.uti
de-g0-bidi.utb
de-g1-bidi-core.cti
de-g1-bidi.ctb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.12.0

2019-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains major updates to the UEB, Afrikaans, Chinese, Danish and Polish tables. Aside from that there have been many code cleanups, such as the elimination of many global vars and bug fixes such as an endless loop or a crash in lou_translate.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

None

Bug fixes

Fix a memory leak when several tables are specified and some of them that can't be resolved. Thanks to André-Abush Clause.
Fix an endless loop with multipass rules where endReplace is smaller or equal to startMatch. Thanks to Bert Frees and Bue Vester-Andersen.

Braille table improvements

Punctuation corrections in Ethiopic Braille thanks to Dr. Tamru E. Belay.
Fixes to the Norwegian 8dot braille table in regards to 4 Sami characters, capital and small letters S and Z with caron. Thanks to Oddvar Øyan and Lars Bjørndal.
Improvements to Afrikaans contracted braille thanks to Christo de Klerk
- Over 50 cases have been corrected where braille rules were not correctly applied in words, mainly in those cases where contractions depend on pronunciation; for example, ui or ie must not be contracted in requiem.
- Corrected contraction errors caused by start or end of input not properly taken into account.
- Words are no longer contracted into lower word contractions when they are adjacent to lower punctuation, for example: "hier.
- Words are now contracted into their lower contractions when they are adjacent to upper punctuation, for example: (hier.
New draft table for Dutch 8-dot computer braille thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
Updates to the Chinese braille table (zh-tw.ctb) thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan, Coscell Kao, 特種兵, 黃偉豪, and Victor Cai.
Fixes to Polish grade 1, thanks to Łukasz Golonka
- Removes some unneeded midnum symbols from the Polish Grade 1.
- Fixes some symbols which weren't defined according to the specification.
- Makes it possible to type dot from a braille keyboard.
- Adds Greek letters and some commonly used math operators to both the Grade 1 and the computer braille table.
Fix several conflicts in fr-bfu-comp68.cti with regards to the IPA Unicode range. These had been especially noticed when compbrlAtCursor mode flag was used. Thanks to André-Abush Clause.
Major Improvements to contraction use in UEB thanks to James Bowden.
Updates to the Danish Tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen:
- Added miscelaneous Unicode characters to 8 dots grade 1 and 2 (accented letters, punctuation, arrows and some math signs). Most of these characters have not been defined in the Danish Braille standard. This implementation is purely experimental, and the characters may be changed later.
- Updated the 6 dots tables with more Unicode characters (no arrows or math signs).
- Corrected a bug in 8 dots grade 2, which resulted in the "var" contraction not always being properly applied.

Other changes

Make sure the log callback uses the same calling convention as all the other exported functions. Thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
Fix a problem with Non-ASCII characters in file paths in the Python bindings, thanks to André-Abush Clause.
Eliminate some of the globals variables thanks to Bert Frees.
The display and the translation are now separated at least internally, thanks to Bert Frees. As a reminder, there are two phases to a braille conversion:
- translation: liblouis uses the rules in the translation table to convert characters to dots
- display: display the dots as characters. Usually liblouis uses the characters defined in display rules (in display tables) but as a fallback it uses mappings defined in the translation table, e.g. letter rules.
No longer install lou_compare, a tool that is used to run regression tests for UEB. As it is only run during testing it will no longer be installed by default on a users machine.
Remove a hidden feature of lou_translate that would cause it to crash if passed an invalid file name. Thanks to Christian Egli.
Raise an error if a dot pattern can not be displayed instead of silently ignoring it thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

nl-comp8.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouisutdml Release 2.8.0

2019-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

This Liblouisutdml release adds a couple of new features and adds support for liblouis 3.11.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Other

New features

Add support for liblouis 3.11
Add a setting for minimum syllable length (hyphenation) thanks to Bert Frees
Add a new page number format: Roman capitals, thanks to Bert Frees

Bug fixes

Drop the dependency on internal liblouis API, thanks to Christian Egli and Bert Frees
Handle empty elements with style thanks to Bert Frees
Fix topBoxline and bottomBoxline thanks to Bert Frees
Fix printPageNumberRange=yes with printPageNumberAt=bottom thanks to Bert Frees
Allow Roman numbers greater than 1000 thanks to Bert Frees
Fix Belgian math thanks to Bert Frees

Other

Added a huge set of MathML -> Nemeth tests thanks to Neil Soiffer
Add a description to the NAME section of the man page thanks to Samuel Thibault

Liblouis Release 3.11.0

2019-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

A tremendous amount of work by Dave Mielke and Bert Frees has gone into this release. They have improved liblouis for use on note taker devices, for backwards translation and a number of languages. Many other contributors (listed below) have also helped in fixing bugs and improving braille tables, such as Dutch, Mongolian, Polish, Ancient Greek, Danish, Irish, Chinese, and American Braille Computer Code.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Enable always rules with a single character and a single braille cell for back-translation. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Implement noUndefined mode for forward translation, thanks to Dave Mielke.
Use fallback braille representations (NABCC) for rendering undefined characters in hexadecimal notation, thanks to Dave Mielke.
Always render undefined characters, also ASCII characters, in hexadecimal notation.
Add a new metadata field index-name for selecting a table from a list fast and efficiently. It has the most important information first and no redundant information. It should look nice when sorted. This in contrast to the existing display-name field which is for describing a table accurately and should sound good. Thanks to Dave Mielke and Bert Frees.

Bug fixes

Don't let a caps passage end on a word with no letters. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Handle word resets in the last word of an caps or emphasis passage if the end indicator was placed before the word. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Never convert to lowercase if capsletter is not defined. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix position mapping for back-translation when noUndefined mode is active. Thanks to Dave Mielke.
Fix bug where a translation would hang on words that match both a nocont and a repeated rule. Thanks to Dave Mielke.
Fix bug where the effect of capsnocont would leak to the next word if that word starts with a capital. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Braille table improvements

Fix an issue with ordinal numbers inside caps passages in Dutch braille. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Improved back-translation for Mongolian thanks to Angaragerdene.
Fixes to Polish grade 1 and Polish computer braille thanks to Łukasz Golonka.
Improvements to Ancient Greek braille, which has been renamed "Greek international braille". A version with composed accents is made available as a .uti table. Thanks to Dave Mielke and Μαρια Γεωργακαράκου (Maria Georgakarakou).
Various improvements to modern Greek thanks to Dave Mielke.
Improvements and fixes to Spanish contracted braille. Details in #741. Thanks to Juan Pablo Bello.
Improvements and fixes to the Danish tables. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Add a display table to match Word CX which is used in Norway and Sweden, and maybe also in other countries thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Fix handling of colon within number in Dutch braille, thanks to Jake Kyle.
Fix translation of bullet and dot operators in Dutch braille, thanks to Paul Rambags
Added North American Braille Computer Code table (en-nabcc.utb) which is the counterpart of the text_nabcc.dis display table. Thanks to Dave Mielke.
Add support for the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to the Chinese bopomofo braille table, thanks to Hurt Huang and Sponge Jhan. Various improvements, including dot patterns and test cases, to the Chinese bopomofo braille table, thanks to Sponge Jhan.
Unified English Braille no longer displays a single underscore when multiple underscores are in the text, thanks to André-Abush Clause.
Update to Afrikaans uncontracted braille and new table for contracted braille. Thanks to Christo de Klerk and Greg Kearney.
Update Irish braille (contracted and uncontracted) to the May 2019 version of the specification, thanks to Ronan McGuirk

Other changes

The python wrapper now encodes and decodes strings to/from UTF-16 and UTF-32 using the surrogatepass error handler. This ensures that single UTF-16 surrogate characters are processed correctly by the wrapper and don't raise an encoding/decoding error. Thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
Metadata keys and values are now case insensitive, thanks to Dave Mielke.
Remove unicodedefs.cti. It was obsolete and never meant to be included by any tables. Instead use the online references as mentioned in the documentation now. See also #696.
lou_checkyaml test reporting has been improved, thanks to Bert Frees. For example it now has a --verbose option so that printing of expected failures can be enabled.
Hyphenation tables have been removed from tables except those needed for nocross rules, thanks to Bert Frees.

The idea is that the caller (for example odt2braille or liblouisutdml) should be able to decide for themselves which hyphenation table to use. The case in which a table contains nocross rules is an exception. In this case the hyphenation patterns are a real part of the table. Because it is not recommended to append an own hyphenation table in this case, a #-has-nocross metadata field was added to indicate that a table contains nocross rules.
lou_hyphenate can now handle more than just words (sequences of letters), e.g compound words, thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice

The noUndefinedDots mode has been renamed to noUndefined. For backwards compatibility noUndefinedDots is still available in the header file and in the Python bindings, as an alias for noUndefined.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

Internally separate more clearly the display and translation phases.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

grc-international-common.uti
grc-international-composed.uti
grc-international-decomposed.uti
en-nabcc.utb

Renamed

gr-bb.ctb -> grc-international-en.utb

Removed

unicodedefs.cti
fi-fi.ctb

Liblouis Release 3.10.0

2019-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

This release comes across as quiet, containing just the usual assortment of braille table improvements, cleanups, bug fixes and the classic buffer overflow patches. But beware, a lot has happened behind the scenes. Bert and Davy have been adding a new opcode to handle special emphasis situations. A number of annoying restrictions with regards to names, such as class names have been removed thank to Bert. And lastly also thanks to Bert it is now possible to define inline display tables in your YAML tests.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Add a new opcode emphmodechars. Thanks to Bert Frees and Davy Kager.

Bug fixes

Remove memoization in checkAttr. It wasn’t implemented correctly, caused some weird bugs and probably didn’t do much for performance. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix multiple buffer overflows in compilePassOpcode. Thanks to Cheng Wen for the report and to Christian Egli for the fix.
Fix a build problem when building without libyaml thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Added modified letters to UEB thanks to Mike Gray.
Complete overhaul of the U.S. six-dot computer braille tables to align with the CBC standard thanks to Timothy Wynn. There is now a sub-table for EBAE (en-us-compbrl.uti) and a stand-alone table (en-us-comp6.ctb).
- Conforms to the CBC standard from BANA for character definitions that differ from the 8-dot ASCII braille (11 punctuation marks).
- Added rules for braille indicators, emphasis indicators, and isolated lower-cell signs to the stand-alone table.
- Uncontracted and contracted EBAE tables no longer use dot 7 when in computer braille mode.
- en-us-compbrl.ctb was deleted because it was identical to en-us-comp6.ctb.
Update Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille thanks to Sponge Jhan
- Correct various dot patterns of Chinese characters.
- Add more known pattern exceptions of Chinese characters.
- Apply word opcode to 倔 and 据.
- Change dot pattern of ＆ to 456-12346.
de-de-comp8.ctb now has definitions for musical Unicode characters thanks to Daniel Mayr
Emphasis improvements in Unified French 6 dots Braille thanks to Ludovic Oger.
Improvements to Unified English braille, Grade 2 thanks to James Datray from Freedom Scientific.
Numerous back-translation fixes to Grade 2 of UK English and Unified English Braille thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Updates to Dutch Braille thanks to Bert Frees
- Hyphen cancels the effect of emphasis indicator
- Left/right curly brackets
- Write currency symbols in full if they come after the number

Other changes

Remove various restrictions on which characters and braille cells can be used in translation rules, thanks to Bert Frees.
Remove some code duplication in pattern.c thanks to Bert Frees
It is now also possible to define inline tables when a display table has been defined thanks to Bert Frees
Nightly snapshots of liblouis are now also built for win64 thanks to Bert Frees

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

en-us-compbrl.uti

Renamed

chardefs.cti -> en-chardefs.cti

Removed

en-us-compbrl.ctb

Liblouisutdml Release 2.7.1

2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

This Liblouisutdml release adds a couple of new features and adds support for liblouis 3.9.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Other

New features

Add support for liblouis 3.9
Add a Dockerfile
Add heading supports for opendocument files thanks to Samuel Thibault
Support automatic page numbering thanks to Samuel Thibault. LibreOffice documents do not provide explicit page numbers, but provides the pagebreak points, so liblouisutdml can simply count the page numbers.
Move math tables from Liblouis to Liblouisutdml thanks to Bert Frees

Bug fixes

Use the prefixed LOG_FOO constants thanks to Christian Egli
Fix cross build from source issue

Other

Convert the test suite to a standard Automake Parallel Test Harness thanks to Christian Egli
Set the default log level to LOU_LOG_WARN

Liblouis Release 3.9.0

2019-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

This release has seen a tremendous amount of work by Bert Frees. He was instrumental in pushing the improvements for Latvian, Norwegian and Slovenian. But most prominently he pushed the big change for space and control character handling through the door. These characters are now no longer hard coded in liblouis. This should solve a few long standing issues. Other than that there is the usual assortment of code improvements and cleanups.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

None

Bug fixes

Fix a problem in the callback registration in the Python bindings thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
Fixed memory leaks created by block scope compound literals thanks to Martin Gieseking.
The hard coded rules dealing with white space have been replaced with a normal table that is included in all tables. This fixes a number of bugs to do with space and control characters. This (big) change has been brewing for a couple of releases and has finally landed. Thanks to Christian Egli and Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Major extension of the German 8 dot computer braille table thanks to Ali-Riza Ciftcioglu. For example the Euro sign or quote characters are finally defined.
Fix a few issues with Hungarian grade1 and grade2 Braille thanks to Attila Hammer.
Various improvements to Norwegian thanks to Lars Bjørndal, Jostein Austvik Jacobsen, Ammar Usama and Bert Frees.
Updates to Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille thanks to Sponge Jhan: Improved Braille representation of Chinese characters, and rewritten Kana rules using multipass statements.
Implement the new Slovenian Braille standard thanks to Robert Merič and Bert Frees.
Updates to Latvian Grade 1 Braille thanks to Artis Raugulis and Bert Frees.
Fixes to English, U.S. Grade 2 (ABAE) thanks to jdatray.

Other changes

Don’t search for tables in /usr/local/share/liblouis/tables (or the Windows equivalent) if LOUIS_TABLEPATH is set.
The log levels in liblouis.h are no longer exposed as LOG_FOO but instead are now prefixed. So LOG_WARN becomes LOU_LOG_WARN for example to issue a warning from a C program using liblouis. The actual values remain the same, so the ABI remains stable.

Deprecation notice

The locale opcode was never implemented and was just silently ignored. It is now removed from the tables and and a warning will be issued if it is found in a table.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

None

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Liblouis Release 3.8.0

2018-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

The major focus of this release is on braille table updates. There are major updates to German, Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, Dutch, Czech, Latvian, Spanish and Ethiopic. Some of these new tables have only been possible because Bert Frees fixed some nasty long standing bugs behind the scene. Also there is the usual assortment of code improvements and cleanups.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

None

Bug fixes

Fix support more than 4 classes thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix capitalization of words that match nocont rules thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Defined the undefined character for the Czech tables thanks to Jan Hegr.
Improvements to Unified English braille thanks to Mike Gray
Updated the Dutch table to the new 2017.1 braille standard thanks to Davy Kager.
Improvements to the Polish grade 1 table, to make back-translations of diacritics working
Fixes to Latvian braille table thanks to Gatis Grintals and Artis Raugulis.
Improvements to traditional Mainland Chinese braille and two-cell Chinese Braille thanks to Sunian Loomee.
Update Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille to version 2018-11 thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan
- Correct the default braille pattern of many Chinese characters
- Add various Chinese phrases involving exceptions of braille patterns
- Modify dot patterns of dashes for readability reasons
Added a table for Turkish grade 2 thanks to Uğur Gürbüz and Simon Aittamaa
Major upgrade to the German tables. They have been upgraded to Das System der deutschen Brailleschrift (2018). They are much smaller now as they are based on lou_maketable. As they now work for any locale (be it Switzerland or Germany) they have been merged into one set of tables for the different grades. Thanks to Christian Waldvogel.
New table for Arabic contracted braille thanks to Ikrami Ahmad.
New table for Arabic computer braille thanks to Ikrami Ahmad.
Improvements to Ethiopic thanks to Tamru E. Belay.
New table for Spanish contracted braille thanks to Juan Pablo Bello.

Other changes

Updated the lou_allround and lou_trace test tools to include all the mode flags described in the documentation of the lou_translateString() function, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

The pass1Only flag has been deprecated for a while and is now removed from the code, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

tr-g2.ctb
ar-ar-g2.ctb
ar-ar-comp8.utb
es-g2.ctb

Renamed

de-de-accents.cti -> de-accents.cti
de-de-g0.utb -> de-g0.utb
de-de-g1.ctb -> de-g1.ctb
de-de-g2.ctb -> de-g2.ctb
de-ch-g0.utb -> de-g0.utb
de-ch-g1.ctb -> de-g1.ctb
de-ch-g2.ctb -> de-g2.ctb

Removed

ar-fa.utb
Es-Es-g1.utb

Liblouis Release 3.7.0

2018-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

This release implements major improvements for back-translation thanks to concerted efforts by Bue Vester-Andersen, Bert Frees, Timothy Lee and others. In particular the input/output positions are now correct also for back-translation. There are new and improved Chinese Braille tables and some long awaited improvements to UEB. The release also has some code cleanups and documentation improvements.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Added a new opcode midendnumericmodechars. Characters defined with this opcode can appear in the middle or at the end of a number without canceling numeric mode. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Bug fixes

Fix another stack-based buffer overflow in input parsing reported by Henri Salo thanks to Christian Egli.
Fix input/output positions for back-translation. Thanks to excellent bug reports and patches by Timothy Lee, Bert Frees heroically sat down and reworked the handling of the input/output positions for back-translation. This solves numerous issues with backward translation.
The returned inlen and outlen now always match thanks to the above work on input/output positions by Bert Frees.
Major improvements in the back-translation of capitalized words (capsword) in conjunction with punctuation and numbers. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen
Fixed a problem in the back-translation of numbers in conjunction with punctuation and letters. Thanks to Rimas Kudelis and Bue Vester-Andersen
Fix a buffer overflow in matchCurrentInput. Thanks to Hongxu Chen for reporting and to Christian Egli for fixing it.

Braille table improvements

Danish grade 2 tables: Reduced hyphenation to only the hyphens necessary for correct Braille translation. Replaced the longer rules with hyphenation for better cursor positioning. Corrected some words. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
New Chinese Mandarin Braille Codes (Grade 1) and (Grade 2) thanks to Sunian Loomee. The first one is for Chinese Common Braille, commonly known as the old Braille where a Chinese character is composed of three Braille Symbols, consonants, vowels and tones. The second table is for Chinese double spelling Braille, commonly known as the new Braille where Chinese character is composed of two Braille Symbols, consonants and vowels and the tones are included in vowels.
Major update to the Urdu tables thanks to Jake Kyle.
Back-translation of numbers in Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, and Swedish has been fixed thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Improvements to UEB such as handling of BLT, BLVD and LLC, number sign placement, final-letter groupsign usage and final-letter back-translation thanks to Mike Gray.
Significant changes to Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille. Among other things there is now complete the support of CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A and some symbols were added for Nemeth. Thanks to Sponge Jhan and 黃偉豪. With this change we can now properly handle duoyinzi, Chinese words that have more than one pronunciation. The granularity of the cursor movement can now reflect positions of all Chinese characters.

Other changes

Added documentation of opcodes which were previously introduced as part of the UEB work. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Test suite improvements: In addition to checking the translation the tests now also check if the provided inlen is the same as the returned inlen and retry the test with a larger output buffer.
Fix a problem in the Makefiles that prevented liblouis from being built with automake 1.16. This is fixed now thanks to a patch from Samuel Thibault.
Removal of the code for the scripting language for multipass opcodes. This code was originally introduced in 2012 but never documented. Consequently it was never used. Meanwhile the original code for multipass opcodes was much improved. So there is no more need for this (duplicate) code and we are removing it.
The nightly snapshots of pre-built windows binaries are now built with UCS4 enabled.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

zhcn-g1.ctb
zhcn-g2.ctb

Renamed

None

Removed

Tables that are only useful in the context of liblouisutdml were moved there

marburg.ctb
marburg_edit.ctb
nemeth.ctb
nemeth_edit.ctb
ukmaths.ctb
ukmaths_edit.ctb
wiskunde-translation.cti
wiskunde.ctb

Liblouis Release 3.6.0

2018-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains the usual assortment of braille table improvements, cleanups and bug fixes. The most prominent change is the refactoring of the call APIs by Bert Frees that makes the code much more manageable and solid and will help us in the future to evolve the library.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Add metadata fields name and display-name to tables thanks to Bert Frees. The name contains a description of the table in the native language. display-name contains an English description.
YAML test enhancements
- You can now test both forward and backwards translation with in the same YAML file and for the same set of tables tests thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen. See the documentation for the bothDirections testmode.
- Add maxOutputLength option in YAML tests.

Bug fixes

Fix a bunch of buffer overflow errors in table parsing thanks to Samuel Thibault and Christian Egli (CVE-2018-11410 and CVE-2018-11440).
Fix input-output mapping of context rules thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix back tracking with all caps words thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix context rules with lookback thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix a memory leak in default table resolver thanks to Timothy Lee.
Fix an array out of bounds error which caused a crash on i386 thanks to Samuel Thibault.
Fix numerous stack-based buffer overflow in table parsing thanks that were reported by Henri Salo thanks to Christian Egli (CVE-2018-11683, CVE-2018-11684 and CVE-2018-11685).

Braille table improvements

Fix some forward- and back-translation errors in Unified French Grade 2 thanks to André-Abush Clause.
Updates to the Simplified-Chinese Braille Translation Table thanks to Roshanson
- Added many polygraphs to distinguish different meanings of a word
- Letter identifiers have been modified. In China’s school for the blind, when many visually impaired students learn, the lowercase letters often do not have to mark the identifiers deliberately. So in this version, we this item has been deleted.
- Fixed a bug in the braille code that revises the space and 0
Updates to Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille Table thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan
- Redefine some Chinese words and phrases
- Add various Nemeth symbols such as arrows and parenthesis
- Complete the support of CJK Compatibility block
- Fix the support of various parentheses, brackets, and braces
- Minor fixes (kana rules, punctuation marks, Greek alphabets)
New 8 dot computer braille table for Czech thanks to Jan Hegr.
Fixes to Czech 6 dot table thanks to Jan Hegr
- Fixed curly brackets representation
- Fixed number sign representation
- Added copyright sign
Minor fixes to Hebrew thanks to Erez Kugler.

Other changes

Refactoring thanks to Bert Frees
- Simplify the emphasis class handling by combining all related vars in a struct EmphasisClass
- Simplify input/output buffer handling
- Combine emphasisBuffer and transnoteBuffer
- Group match related vars in a struct PassRuleMatch
- Remove dead code
Fixed many warnings thanks to Christian Egli

Deprecation notice

The mode parameter in lou_dotsToChar never had any effect and is now deprecated.
In 2012 a new way to specify the test and action part in context and multipass opcodes was introduced. It was never documented and has no known usage in the wild. However it opens up the attack surface to the table parsing code. Therefore it is deprecated and will be removed in the next release.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

cs-comp8.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

Cz-Cz-g1.utb

Liblouis Release 3.5.0

2018-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

This release has a number of Braille table improvements, cleanups and meta data enhancements. The most prominent new feature however is probably the much improved test coverage. This has helped in tracing and fixing a number of long standing bugs.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

The same name can now be used in more than one class rule. The effect is that both set of characters become part of that one class.

Bug fixes

Fix a regression in inputPositions thanks to Bert Frees
Treat characters within the range compbrlStart and compbrlEnd as a special case. This fixes many if not most of the problems with cursor position and the compbrlAtCursor mode. Thanks to Dave Mielke.
Fix swapdd opcode thanks to Bert Frees
Fix negation of attribute matcher in multipass expressions thanks to Bert Frees

Braille table improvements

Add a display table that maps braille dots to brl/brf character set. For an in depth explanation see the corresponding github issue. Thanks to Rimas Kudelis
Major Improvements to Unified French Grade 2 thanks to André-Abush Clause
Fix braille number input for Greek Braille thanks to Dave Mielke
Add a fix for “phad” according to UEB Rule 10.7.3 thanks to Anthony Tibbs
Updates to the Urdu tables thanks to Jake Kyle from Compass Braille
Updates to the Chinese braille table (zh-tw.ctb) thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan
IPA.utb now contains a more complete list of phonetic symbols, including some that might conflict with other tables. For this reason it is not suitable for inclusion in other tables. A separate table IPA-unicode-range.uti has been added for this purpose. Thanks to Ludovic Oger.
The Mongolian table has been improved and there is now also support for grade 2 thanks to Tsengel Maidar.
Minor updates to the Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen
Fix back translation of numbers in Dutch, Finnish and Canadian French, thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
New table for Ukrainian thanks to Sergiy Moskalets.

Other changes

Improved documentation

Extend the documentation on multipass opcodes. Thanks to Dave Mielke and Christian Egli.
Remove the deprecation note of the ‘=’ dots operand. While there are still problems with back-translation we will not remove support for it. See also the discussion in the github issue.

Improved meta data information in tables

The meta data in the tables such as locale, contraction grade, etc has been improved and is now also used when testing from a YAML test. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Major overhaul of the YAML test suite

Support for proper testing of cursor positions

Due to problems in the cursor position computation the YAML test suite was improved to support proper testing of cursor position also in combination with input, output position and modes. In essence all of the liblouis API is now supported and can be tested via the YAML tests. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Support for table selection via meta data query

The tables to be tested can now be specified via a meta data query in addition to specifying them by filename. See the documentation for more details. Internally the YAML tests have been split up into tests that test the braille translation for a particular locale (now located in tests/braille_specs) and tests that check a specific feature of liblouis. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

The translation mode comp8Dots has been removed as it was never really implemented anyway
Support for the pass1Only flag has now been removed. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
The old UEB tables UEBC-g1.ctb and UEBC-g2.ctb have been removed as the have been superseded by en-ueb-g1.ctb and en-ueb-g2.ctb.
The french tables fr-2007.ctb, fr-fr-g1.utb, fr-fr-g2.ctb, fr-ca-g1.utb and fr-ca-g2.ctb have been removed. Use fr-bfu-comp6.utb for 6 dots literary, fr-bfu-comp8.utb for 8 dots computer and fr-bfu-g2.ctb for contracted braille instead.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

IPA-unicode-range.uti
mn-MN-g2.ctb
uk.utb

Renamed

mn-MN.utb -> mn-MN-g1.utb

Removed

fr-2007.ctb
fr-ca-g1.utb
Fr-Ca-g2.ctb
fr-fr-g1.utb
Fr-Fr-g2.ctb
UEBC-g1.ctb
UEBC-g2.ctb

Liblouis Release 3.4.0

2017-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

This release brings together a lot of work by lots of different people. Probably the most prominent fix is the work on output positions by Bue and Bert. NVDA should benefit from this. Then there are new and massively improved tables like the Lithuanian 6-dot table by Rimas or the improved back-translation for French by Michel and André-Abush to name just a few. There are too many contributors to name them here, thanks to them all.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements
Other changes
Deprecation notice
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed

New features

Add support for inputPos and outputPos checking in lou_checkyaml thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen. See the manual for details and examples.

Bug fixes

output positions (outputPos) are now calculated based on input positions (inputPos) thanks to Bert Frees. This avoids a whole class of bugs that previously plagued the output positions. This fix also obviates the need for the pass1Only flag. See below for the deprecation notice.

Braille table improvements

Addition of Nemeth and Kangxi radical characters and other improvements to Chinese braille (zh-tw.ctb) thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan and 黃偉豪.
Improvements to the Spanish chardefs table thanks to Luis Lorente Barajas and Simon Aittamaa.
Fixed a lowercase ó in Spanish first reported for NVDA thanks to Sukil Etxenike.
New Norwegian 6-dot display braille table for Braillo embossers thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Added a bunch of whitespace-like codepoints as spaces thanks to Rimas Kudelis
Added Lithuanian 6-dot table thanks to Rimas Kudelis.
Addition of more characters to the French tables thanks to Samuel Thibault
Improvements to the Hungarian tables thanks to Attila Hammer
Improvements to the Mongolian tables thanks to Tsengel Maidar
Fix some math signs in Czech Braille (cs-chardefs.cti). Thanks to Christian Herden of ViewPlus for reporting this.
Updates to the SEB British Braille Tables thanks to Paul Wood
Massive improvements to French back-translation thanks to Michel Such and André-Abush Clause

Other changes

Improved documentation

Bue Vester-Andersen added some notes about back-translation and documented all possible values of the mode parameter. Also the description of decpoint and litdigit was improved.
The match opcode is now documented thanks to Mike Gray and Christian Egli.

`lou_maketable`

Numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements thanks to Bert Frees

Code refactoring

Many global variables have been removed thanks to Bert Frees

Code formatting

Thanks to clang-format There is now a uniform coding style over the whole code base

Fix broken `NMakefile`

Thanks to Davy Kager building with nmake should work again

Deprecation notice

The pass1Only flag has been deprecated. Its use should be avoided, and it will be completely removed from the code in the next version of Liblouis. When using the pass1Only flag in this release you will get a warning.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

no-no-braillo-047-01.dis
lt-6dot.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Docker images

2017-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

We are happy to announce that there are now official docker images for both liblouis and liblouisutdml. These images are built on every commit and can act as a sort of a nightly snapshot if you will. This opens up a number of possibilities and use cases. All you need to do is to install docker and off you go.

Once you have docker installed you can simply start any of the liblouis tools with docker run. To run lou_translate for example you’d type the following:

$ docker run --rm -it liblouis/liblouis lou_translate en-ueb-g2.ctb
This is a test
,? is a te/

The liblouis docker image supports lou_checkyaml and has the Python bindings installed, so you could run a local YAML test to check your local table.

$ ls
mytest.utb  mytest.yaml
$ docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/usr/src/ -i liblouis/liblouis lou_checkyaml /usr/src/mytest.yaml
SUCCESS (1 tests, 0 failures)

where mytest.yaml could look as follows:

table: [unicode.dis, mytest.utb]
tests:
  -
    - abcdefg
    - ⠁⠃⠉⠙⠑⠋⠛

Another interesting use case for this is to run file2brl:

$ docker run --rm -i liblouis/liblouisutdml file2brl < input.xml > output.xml

Please try this out and give us feedback via the mailing list.

Liblouis Release 3.3.0

2017-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

This release brings a slew of Braille table improvements, fixes a number of security related bugs and introduces a new tool to generate liblouis Braille tables based on a corpus of know good Braille translations. For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features
- Maketable tool
- Meta data query API
Bug fixes
- Back translation
- Security
Braille table improvements
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
Next release

New features

Maketable tool

A new tool lou_maketable enables the creation of tables based on a corpus of known good Braille translations. This has huge potential to simplify table maintenance for tables that have so far been dominated by large exception lists. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Meta data query API

A new API and a corresponding command line tool to query table meta data thanks to Bert Frees

Bug fixes

Back translation

UEB grade 2
- Fix back-translation of whole word contractions followed by other contractions thanks to James Teh.
- Fix back-translation for contractions followed by punctuation thanks to James Teh.

Security

Fix a number of CVEs (illegal address access, buffer overflow and use-after-free or in terms of CVEs: CVE-2017-13738, CVE-2017-13739, CVE-2017-13740, CVE-2017-13741, CVE-2017-13742 and CVE-2017-13744) thanks to Mike Gorse.
Fix CVE-2017-13743 thanks to Christian Egli.

Braille table improvements

New table for Croatian grade 1 Braille thanks to Zlatko Sobočan.
Fixes and tests for Slovak Braille thanks to Simon Aittamaa
Numerous fixes in the character definitions of the Spanish tables thanks to Simon Aittamaa
Unified French 6 dots and 8 dots improvements for back-translation thanks to Michel Such
Updates to the Chinese braille table thanks to Coscell Kao
Updates to Nemeth character definitions thanks to Attila Hammer
The Hungarian tables now conform to the new 2017 standard thanks to Attila Hammer

New, renamed or removed tables

New

hr-g1.ctb
hr-g1.tbl

Renamed

hr.ctb -> hr-comp8.utb
hr.tbl -> hr-comp8.tbl

Next release

The next release will be published on December 4, 2017 so please keep up the excellent work and keep those improvements coming.

Liblouis ported to Javascript

2017-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

We are happy to announce that liblouis now officially supports platforms targeting Javascript. This includes web browsers, javascript-based servers and cross-platform applications.

The new Javascript port of liblouis is created by cross-compiling the original liblouis implementation written in the programming language C and wrapping it in javascript code that makes table loading from remote sources, switching the liblouis release version and other tasks that are more common in browser environments easy.

While you might not be a Javascript developer, there are other reasons to be excited about this new way to use liblouis: A browser based interface allows you to try or showcase liblouis versions without installation. It also has a benefit for table authors and maintainers as regressions in liblouis tables can now easily be detected. We already provide a tool that lets you create interactive test cases that can be used to report bugs.

Javascript packages can either be cloned directly from the repository or downloaded through the package managers npm and bower.

You can install the latest official liblouis release using the commands

$ npm install liblouis-build@latest
$ npm install liblouis

Or install the latest available development version of liblouis using the commands

$ npm install liblouis/js-build
$ npm install liblouis

Several usage examples and extended installation instructions can be found in the instructions displayed at the repository landing page.

Liblouis Release 3.2.0

2017-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Aside from the usual improvements to Braille tables this release focuses on improving the internal infrastructure. Numerous bugs have been fixed, the CI infrastructure also checks mingw builds now and MSVC compatibility has been massively improved. For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

Bug fixes
Other changes
Braille table improvements
Backwards incompatible changes
New, renamed or removed tables
- New
- Renamed
- Removed
Next release

Bug fixes

Fix capsnocont opcode. Also mark capital letters with capsletter symbol when capsnocont is defined but no begcapsword indicator is defined. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Fix the syllable opcode. It had been broken under some circumstances since 3.0. Thanks to Bert Frees and Christian Egli.

Other changes

Fix building of Python bindings when cross-compiling. Thanks to Chris Brannon
lou_checkyaml is now only installed if libyaml is available. Thanks to Christian Egli
Major internal changes to improve MSVC compatibility. Thanks to Davy Kager
Enhance documentation on usage of display tables in particular in conjunction with Unicode dot patterns. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to the Swedish 8-dots table (se-se.ctb) thanks to Kevin Derome
Improvements to the Simplified-Chinese Braille table thanks to Roshanson
Fixes for the International Phonetic Alphabet Braille table thanks to Ludovic Oger
Added more Unicode symbols (fractions and not equal) to the UEB tables. Thanks to Paul Wood and James Bowden.
Fixes to UEB grade 2 (en-ueb-g2.ctb) thanks to Mike Gray.
Vastly improved Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
- New literary tables for 6 dots, mainly for embossing (no back-translation).
- Improved back-translation in 6 dots tables, all grades.
- New support for many Unicode characters in all 6 dots tables.
- Strengthened internal tests to prevent breaking of tables due to changes in the code.
- Fixed 8 dots tables which were broken in the previous version.
New Braille tables for Sinhala script thanks to Ashoka Bandula Weerawardhana.
New Hungarian grade 2 Braille table thanks to Attila Hammer.
Improvements to UEB in particular to symbols specified mostly on the Appendix 3 (Symbols List) from the Rules of Unified English Braille Second Edition 2013 document thanks to Victor Montalvão.
Improvements to Persian 8 dot computer Braille table thanks to Mohammadreza Rashad.

Backwards incompatible changes

The old Greek table gr-gr-g1.utb is gone. Use el.ctb instead
The doctests are gone. They have been superseded by the YAML tests.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

sin.cti
sin.utb
hu-hu-g2.ctb
da-dk-6miscChars.cti
da-dk-g16-lit.ctb
da-dk-g26-lit.ctb
da-dk-g26l-lit.ctb

Renamed

gr-gr-g1.utb (removed and replaced by el.ctb)

Removed

da-chardefs6.cti
da-dk-common6.uti
da-dk-g26-patches.cti
da-dk-g2core.cti
da-dk-nocaps.uti

Next release

The next release will be published on September 4, 2017 so please keep up the excellent work and keep those improvements coming.

Liblouis Release 3.1.0

2017-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

An influx of new contributors have made sure that liblouis continues to improve. Back translation has seen major improvements, there are some additional modes to help screen readers, for many tables meta data has been added, the Python bindings are more robust, Windows support has been improved, the YAML test suite has been generalized and as usual new and improved braille tables have been included. On the licensing front we managed to get almost all tables re-licensed to LGPLv2.1+.

New features
Bug fixes
Other changes
Braille table improvements
License changes
Backwards incompatible changes
Next release

New features

Meta data

Most of the translation tables now contain meta data. This makes them discoverable. Programs can use the lou_findTable function to find a table based on a query.

`noUndefinedDots` mode

Add a noUndefinedDots mode to disable the output of dot numbers when back-translating undefined patterns. Thanks to James Teh.

When back translating input from a braille keyboard cell by cell, it is desirable to output characters as soon as they are produced. Similarly, when back translating contracted braille, it is desirable to provide a “guess” to the user of the characters they typed. To achieve this, liblouis needs to have the ability to produce no text when indicators (which don’t produce a character by themselves) are not followed by another cell. This works already for indicators liblouis knows about such as capital sign, number sign, etc., but it does not work for indicators which are not (and cannot be) specifically defined as indicators. For example, in UEB, dots 4 5 6 alone produces the text “\456/”. Setting the noUndefinedDots mode suppresses this dot number output.

`partialTrans` mode

Add a partialTrans mode to specify that back-translation input should be treated as an incomplete word. Thanks to James Teh.

If this mode is set, rules that apply only for complete words or at the end of a word will not take effect. This is intended to be used when translating input typed on a braille keyboard to provide a rough idea to the user of the characters they are typing before the word is complete.

YAML test framework

The YAML framework has been extended and is much more useful now. You can test multiple tables within one YAML file, you can define test tables directly inline and you can test multiple tables using the same test data. Refer to the documentation for the details.

If really not wanted the YAML tests can be disabled by specifying configure --without-yaml.

Bug fixes

Fixes implicit declaration of pattern_check thanks to Reiner Dolp
Fix a stackoverflow crash on applications with smaller stack size. Thanks to Victor Montalvão.
Fix the \v escape sequence. Thanks to Davy Kager.
The Python bindings now give a helpful error if liblouis has been compiled with a different character size than Python. Thanks to Matt Wenn.
Massive bug fixes in multipass rules. Dave Mielke has done a tremendous job improving the multipass machinery also in the context of back-translation. Where needed nofor/noback has been added to the multipass rules.

Other changes

Improvements to the Emacs mode for editing liblouis tables thanks to Christian Egli
Documenting lou_charSize thanks to Reiner Dolp
Support for relative table paths in the tests. This will make sure you always know which table a test actually uses.
Infrastructure to build windows binaries in a Docker container, thanks to Bert Frees

Braille table improvements

UEB improvements, thanks to Mike Gray
- Fixed apostrophe and back translation
- Added rules for Unicode apostrophe handling
- Improvements to UEB and Nemeth math
Complete overhaul of Lithuanian 8-dots table, thanks to Rimas Kudelis
New Urdu 6 Dot Grade 1 and 2 Braille tables thanks to Jake Kyle
Improvements to Italian 8 dots computer braille, thanks to Simone Dal Maso.
New table unicode-braille.utb that helps to back translate braille input to Unicode braille output, thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
Improvements to the Chinese braille table thanks to Coscell Kao.
New Turkish braille table for grade 1 that should replace the old tr.ctb table, thanks to Arend Arends.
New Persian grade 1 table and 8-dots computer table thanks to Mohammadreza Rashad.
New table for the International Phonetic Alphabet thanks to Ludovic Oger
Fixes for the French 6 and 8 dots tables thanks to Michel Such. Some errors have been fixed and many Unicode characters have been added.
Add an extended 8-dot computer braille table for U.S. English thanks to Davy Kager. The table is tailored for use on Windows (CP-1252) and uses dot patterns from Windows screen readers, but should be useful on other platforms too.
New Greek table that is better than the existing Greek Grade 1 Braille Table (gr-gr-g1.utb) thanks to Dave Mielke.
Improved number back-translations on fr-fr-g1 and vi-g1 tables thanks to Victor Montalvao.
New Chinese Braille table for use in the mainland of China thanks to Kaifang Bao of RejoinTech.
The Black Circle character is commonly used for displaying password characters. The absence of its definition leads to users not being able to know how many characters were typed in such fields. This has been improved for many tables thanks to Victor Montalvao.

License changes

DocArch has agreed to re-license their tables, so we have 8 more tables under the LGPLv2.1+.

Backwards incompatible changes

The naming in the YAML test framework has changed slightly from tables: to table:.

Next release

The next release will be published on June 5, 2017 so please keep up the excellent work and keep those improvements coming.

Liblouis Release 3.0.0

2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

This is the biggest release of liblouis in years. The major news are that we now have proper support for UEB and secondly that liblouis is now licensed under LGPLv2.1+.

In order to support UEB the internals of liblouis have seen a major rewrite. New Opcodes have been added to support the requirements for proper UEB for example for emphasis handling or to handle proper translation of numbers. Changes to the opcodes are described in the documentation. Some of these changes are not backwards compatible. All tables that come with liblouis have been migrated. If you have private tables look at the section on upgrading from previous versions in the wiki.

This release also changes the C API. External applications will have to adapt the way they call liblouis. In particular the typeform parameter has changed.

The license of the library and most of the tables has been changed to LGPLv2.1. For a detailed list which tables are still in the process of migrating the license refer to the wiki page about the license change.

New features
Bug fixes
Other changes
Braille table improvements
Backwards incompatible changes
Next release

New features

Numerous features to support UEB properly. Thanks to Mike Gray, William Freeman, Davy Kager, Keith Creasy and the American Printing House for the Blind for sponsoring this work.
- support the many emphasis classes needed for UEB.
- support translation of numbers according to the rules of UEB.
- Capitalization is now handled just like emphasis.
- support for numeric mode
UTF-8 support for all tools thanks to Christian Egli.
The YAML tests now allow for an optional test description. See the documentation for more details.
Add lou_checkTable and lou_getTypeformForEmphClass to the C API and to the Python bindings

Bug fixes

Stop buffer overrun in lou_getProgramPath, and also free memory after usage. Thanks to Michael Curran.

Other changes

The license of the library and most of the tables has been changed to LGPLv2.1+.
Improvements to the test suite:
- Output is printed to stderr. This helps with locating errors when testing with the YAML test suite.
- typeform is included in output.

Braille table improvements

Improved Finish 6-dot braille thanks to Jukka Eerikäinen
Improvements to the Chinese braille table thanks to Coscell Kao
Improvements to Mongolian thanks to Tsengel Maidar and Sreeja Param
Added new Slovak tables based off the official Slovak braille standard thanks to Peter Vagner
Changes to the Norwegian tables. There are now three Norwegian 8-dot tables
- no-no-comp8.ctb: Norwegian 8-dot computer braille table
- no-no-8dot.utb: Norwegian 8-dot braille table
- no-no-8dot-fallback-6dot-g0.utb: Norwegian 8-dot braille table with uncontracted 6-dot fallback
Changes to the Dutch tables
- Conforms better to the standard.
- nl-BE-g1.ctb renamed to nl-BE-g0.utb
- nl-NL-g1.ctb renamed to nl-NL-g0.utb
Improvements to Danish tables: Added grade 2 with limited contractions to 6 and 8 dots. Corrected contraction of many words.
- Renamed:
  - da-ansi8.dis -> da-dk-octobraille.dis
  - da-dk-g16.utb -> da-dk-g16.ctb
  - da-dk-g18.utb -> da-dk-g18.ctb
  - hyph_da_DK.dic -> hyph_brl_da_dk.dic
- Removed: da-dk-g28caps.cti, da-dk-g28-patches.cti and da-chardefs8.cti

Backwards incompatible changes

The json based harness test suite has been removed as its functionality has been superceded by the YAML tests. Please use these from now on.
A number of opcodes to handle emphasis have been renamed.
The C API regarding the typeform parameter has changed.

Next release

The next release will be published on September 5, 2016 so please keep up the excellent work and keep those improvements coming.

Send To Braille Windows Shortcut

2016-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

Send To Braille is a tool published by APH to create a quick and dirty braille file using Liblouis and Pandoc on Windows. It adds a shortcut to your Send To folder, so you can point at a file, right click and pick Send To, then pick Braille. It creates a braille version of the file with minimal formatting in the same folder with .brl appended to the end of the original file’s name. It keeps the original extension to help you see the original file’s source, so if you translate test.doc, you end up with test.doc.brl. Please visit the project page for more information and downloads.

Liblouis Release 2.6.5

2015-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

This minor release introduces new tables (Mongolian and Norwegian 8 dot) and new features to the tracing tool. But the most exiting news about this release is probably the fact that 12 developers have contributed to it, showing how widely used liblouis is and how actively the development progresses.

New features
Bug fixes
Other changes
Braille table improvements
Next release

New features

A DEF file is now generated automatically for the windows builds. Thanks to Christian Egli
lou_trace supports backtranslation now. Thanks to Bert Frees

Bug fixes

Fix a bug in the findtable code. Thanks to Michael Katzmann for the report.
Fix some compile time warnings on Windows, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Fixes to the logging code by Arend Arends.

Other changes

Add test data for EUB symbols, thanks to Paul Wood
Clean up dead code i.e. remove support for (undocumented) nobreak opcode. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Braille table improvements

New Mongolian table thanks to Tsengel Maidar and Sreeja Param.
Improvements to the Chinese braille table thanks to Coscell Kao.
Massive improvements to Norwegian, thanks to Lars Bjørndal, Ammar Usama and Jostein Austvik Jacobsen. They added a 8 dot table and lots of test data.
Improvements to Hungarian, thanks to Attila Hammer

Next release

The next release will be published on March 7 2016, so please keep up the excellent work and keep those improvements coming.

Liblouis Release 2.6.4

2015-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

This is a minor release in terms of features. But in terms of test coverage and stability it is a vast improvement over previous versions of Liblouis. The new YAML based test suite contains more than a million of validated translations. Every change in Liblouis is tested against this corpus ensuring the change doesn’t break anything.

New features
Bug fixes
Other changes
Braille table improvements
Next release

New features

YAML based harness tests. Harness tests can now be written in simple YAML notation and they are integrated with the normal make check command. They can be used for both ucs2 and ucs4 and no Python is required. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Bug fixes

Use a separate gnulib instance for the library and the tools. Use the strndup module to avoid build problems on windows.
Fix a problem with the nocross opcode when used in combination with the opcodes nocont and compbrl, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Fix a problem with the decoding of the harness test files. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix numerous problems in the way braille indicators are handled. There is now a safe version of the checkAttr function which makes sure that no attributes are checked beyond the boundaries of the currentInput. This fixes the random behavior with tests where the emphasis extends to the end of the input string. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Other changes

if found use texi2any to build the documentation, thanks to Martin Michlmayr.
Fix permissions of Korean tables, thanks to Peter Lundblad.
Update the windows build instructions, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to Hungarian, thanks to Attila Hammer
Improvements to Hungarian 8 dot and Serbian grade 1, thanks to Zvonimir Stanecic

Next release

The next release will be published on November 30 2015, so please keep up the excellent work and keep those improvements coming.

Liblouisutdml Release 2.6.0

2015-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

This is the first official Liblouisutdml release in a long time. Many bug fixes and stability improvements have gone into it. There are a couple of new features like end note functionality and boxlines for example. Also there is an extensive test suite now and the documentation has been vastly enhanced.

New features

Added an extensive test suite which tests liblouisutml under various circumstances.
Add a configure option to disable the Java bindings.
Added Java bindings for logging callback API in liblouis.
Add end note functionality. Thanks to Paul Wood from Torch Trust

Bug fixes

fixed a problem with duplicate semantics attributes
solve multiple brl nodes after math nodes
Improve the documentation on XPath expressions.
Fixed numerous problems in the build system.
Fixed the character used when UCS2 builds encounter characters above u+ffff

Documentation updates

Document the end note functionality
Add an index for the default styles
Update the documentation appendix
Add the boxline style. Thanks to Michael Whapples.

Liblouis Release 2.6.3

2015-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Given the release number you might think this is only a minor release. However looking at the number of developers who contributed to it and the number of pull requests and issues that were solved this turns out to be a very impressive and solid release. Most prominently we have a new function to discover tables based on meta data in table headers. Also makeinfo is no longer required to build liblouis. And lastly we have numerous improvements in Braille tables such as Korean, Vietnamese and UEB to name just a few.

New features
Bug fixes
Other changes
Braille table improvements

New features

[beta] The new function lou_findTable can be used for table discovery based on meta data in table headers. Thanks to Bert Frees.
The Python API now has a new function to check tables aptly named checkTable. Thanks to Davy Kager.

Bug fixes

Fixed a problem in resolveTable when using a Java resolver, thanks to Bert Frees

Other changes

The build dependency on makeinfo is now optional. If it is not installed we simply do not build the documentation.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to Bengali, Devanagari, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, Telugu and Oriya, thanks to Sreeja Param
Corrections and improvements made to en-GB tables thanks to Paul Wood
Vast restructuring to Korean tables. In 2006 the Institute for Korean Braille modified some dots in Korean Braille. Specifically, some punctuation dots are now based on English. To accommodate this change and to retain the old tables, the Korean table set was revised as follows:
- Added three files: ko-chars, the Korean characters dictionary, and rules for g1 and g2.
- ko-g1 and ko-g2 are now interface files that includes needed files.
- Added three files for Korean Braille 2006 revision along with a test harness.
New table for Polish 8 dot computer braille. Thanks to Karol Pecyna.
New table for Vietnamese 6 dot. Thanks to Harri Pasanen.
Corrections and improvements made to UEB tables thanks to Paul Wood
- Typeform passage indicators
- Degree sign
- Dash signs
- Math signs
- Accent modifiers
- Accented letters

Liblouis Release 2.6.2

2015-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

This release which was mostly pushed out the door by Bert and Mesar fixes a long standing emphasis bug, adds more functionality to the harness test suite and improves, as usual, on Braille tables.

New features
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements

New features

Harness tests now can test for typeform differences.

Bug fixes

Fix for emphasis bug, thanks to Michael Gray

Braille table improvements

Correction to comments in Norwegian generic tables, thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Corrections to dot patterns in no-no-g0.utb thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Corrections and additional test cases for Hungarian grade 1, thanks to Hammer Attila.

Liblouis Release 2.6.1

2014-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

This release focuses on table and documentation improvements. The documentation has been restructured to cater to people starting with writing Braille tables. End users will see improvements to Braille for Danish, Dutch, Hungarian, Irish and UK English.

New features
- New Braille tables
Braille table improvements
Bug fixes
Documentation updates
Other changes
Backwards incompatible changes

New features

New Braille tables

New grade 1 and grade 2 Gaeilge tables implementing the 2014 UIB standard. Including tests, thanks to Ronan McGuirk, Mesar Hameed.

Braille table improvements

Updates and correction to Hungarian braille tables, thanks to Hammer Attila.
Correction to English UK grade 2 braille tables and new tests, thanks to Paul Wood, Mesar Hameed
Vastly improved Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen
- back-translation, both in 6 dots grade 2 and 8 dots grade 2.
- Better handling of dash, slash, and other punctuation within words in 8 dots grade 2.
New table for Dutch (Netherlands) thanks to Henri Apperloo from CBB

Bug fixes

fix a compiler warning in the logging code. Thanks Peter Lundblad for reporting it and Michael Whapples for fixing the problem.

Documentation updates

The documentation has been restructured to be more beginner friendly and a short introduction to translation table writing has been added. Thanks to Joseph Lee and Christian Egli

Other changes

When compiling with mingw or cygwin resulting dll is liblouis.dll.
runHarness.py: add new output format, compact output mode suitable for grepping.

Backwards incompatible changes

Deleted ga.ctb now superseded by ga-g1.utb and ga.g2.ctb.
Nl-Nl-g1.utb has been removed. It is superseded by nl-NL-g1.ctb.
nl-be-g1.utb has been removed. It is superseded by nl-BE-g1.ctb.

Liblouis Release 2.6.0

2014-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

This is the first release by the new maintainer team. A lot of work by people from across the community contributed to this release. There are massive additions and updates to the Braille tables (e.g. Afrikaans, Hebrew, many Indian languages, Korean) and also changes to the C API to enable call backs for error messages and warnings.

New features
- New Braille tables
- Logging callback
Bug fixes
Braille table improvements

New features

New Braille tables

Tables for Afrikaans, Cherokee, Hawaiian, Maori, Sotho and Tswana were donated by Greg Kearney. Afrikaans, Cherokee, Maori and Hawaiian all are grade 1 tables and with the exception of Cherokee were derived from World Braille Usage 2013. The Cherokee was taken from the specification published at http://www.cbtbc.org/cherokee/.

Logging callback

There is now a callback system in place to get error messages and warnings. This can be used from programs that use liblouis to log warnings for example.

Bug fixes

fix back translation problems when word gets split in unusual places causing back translation of whole words for example K5 back translates to Knowledgeen, M>k back translates to Moreark, and M5 back translates to Moren. This caused over 8400 extra back translation errors in en-us-g2 and 5000 in en-ueb-g2. Thanks to Ken Perry.
Fixed bug to prevent removal of \xffff between largesign rules. This solves a Liblouisutdml bug where \xffff is used as a segment delimiter.
Fixed a bug in back translation, when a letsign was encountered, the letsign was being applied beyond the element it applied to.
Fix memory leaks in the default table resolver introduced in the previous release.
Fixes to the build system by Simon Aittamaa

Braille table improvements

Major improvements to Indian tables thanks to the Indian National Institute for Visually Handicapped, in particular Dipendra Manocha, Mesar Hameed, Dinesh Kaushall and Sreeja Parameswaran:
- Corrected opcodes for letters, punctuation marks, digits, signs etc.
- Updated braille codes according to prescribed braille codes for each Unicode character by the Braille Council of India for all Indian languages.
- defined rules for dealing with Nukhta character in Hindi table
- defined rule to insert dot-1 between consonant followed by full vowel character in all Indian Languages
- defined rules for shifting of halant character before the consonant. This character is placed after the consonant in normal typing but need to be before the consonant in braille. This rule is applicable for all Indian languages.
- defined rules for two conjunct characters “ksha and gya” used in all Indian Languages for which there are specific codes in Braille.
New Hebrew table that is based on the new unified Hebrew Braille code standard that was put together on January 2014 after a conference with all of the specialists in this field in Israel. It includes improved representation of Hebrew letters, special letters that are called Nikud, and punctuation symbols. The old Braille standard is not relevant any more. Thanks to Adi Kushnir.
UEB table fixes: Fix ity contraction, fixed the missing end word contraction ;n ;d sign 46. thanks to Ken Perry.
Fix for Norwegian where letsign is affecting some extra characters thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Much improved hyphenation for Norwegian thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Korean Grade 2 now includes support for reading English text using grade 2.
en-us-g1.ctb and en-ueb.g1.ctb are now able to display 8 dot Unicode braille.

Liblouis moves to a time based release schedule

2014-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

In the irc meeting the maintainer team agreed to move to a time based release schedule. We will release four times a year namely always on Monday of ISO week 10, 23, 36 and 49.

Hence the next release will be on September 1, 2014, followed by December 1, 2014, March 2, 2015, June 1, 2015, August 31, 2015, November 30, 2015 and so forth.

What will be in the next release?

Generally whatever is ready will be included in the release. For the next release have a look at the pending pull requests.

In particular there are a number of table improvements that we would like to include. For table improvements we also want test data to ensure quality. So if you want your table included in the release please provide test data.

Is this coordinated with NVDA, Orca, etc?

Yes, we try to accommodate the release schedule of other projects. Picking dates however is always a balancing act.

Maintainership succession

2014-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

John Boyer and ViewPlus initiated the liblouis project which includes liblouis and liblouisutdml 12 years ago as an open source tool to translate and format braille. With the help of ViewPlus John has dedicated a lot of time into this project, has built a tremendous community around it and has improved many a persons life.

Now at the age of 78 he wishes to move on and step back from the day-to-day work of maintaining both liblouis and liblouisutdml. For that reason we propose to move to a team maintainership where Mesar Hameed, Bert Frees and Christian Egli offer to take over the maintenance work for liblouis. This is a big shoe to fill even as a team we probably do not have the expertise, power and full time dedication as John has it. But we hope that together and with the occasional help of John and the mailing list we can keep liblouis moving and bring it to new heights.

The details will have to be hashed out but it will probably mean that Christian will keep on doing releases on a regular bases, Mesar will work with table authors to improve the language coverage and Bert has some plans up his sleeves to improve the liblouis documentation, the test coverage and maybe even some of the core opcodes.

Note that while this is excellent news for liblouis itself it also means that there is a need for a maintainer or a team of maintainers for liblouisutdml. Please step up if you want to make sure that liblouisutdml is moving forward.

The new maintainer team would like to thank John for his tremendous efforts and is exited to bring liblouis forward with the help of John and the community.

Liblouis Release 2.5.4

2014-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains nine months worth of braille table improvements for example for Danish, UEB, en-us, Nemeth, Bulgarian, Slovenian and many more. Also there are fixes to the core for table path resolving and back-translation.

New features
Bug Fixes
Braille Table Improvements
Backwards incompatible changes
Invisible changes

New features

Added function lou_registerTableResolver for plugging in a table resolver callback from your host language.

Bug Fixes

Fixed ENDSEGMENT indicator in computer Braille thanks to John Boyer.
Emphasized words should now be contracted consistently thanks to John Boyer.
Fixed several problems with back-translation. A slash within a number and strings such as 5-inch-diameter and 25-year-old-man should now back-translate correctly. Thanks to John Boyer.
Fixed a problem with syllable opcode. Thanks to John Boyer.
Fix warnings with gcc 4.8.2. Thanks to Peter Lundblad.
When a table is specified with an absolute or relative path, the “includes” in that table will now work as expected, meaning files in the same directory will be found.

Braille Table Improvements

fr-bfu-comp8.utb: corrections, zero was wrongly displayed in some instances.
en-us-g2.ctb, en-ueb-g2.ctb: Fixes for that’s, can’t and s’ thanks to Ken Perry.
en-us-g2.ctb: Fix for back-translation of things like <http://address.com>, words including after, capsigns. thanks to Ken Perry.
Further corrections and testcases to the Hungarian tables thanks to Hammer Attila
Fixed letter sign in en-us and en-ueb tables. Thanks to John Boyer and Ken Perry.
UEB Fixes thanks to Mesar Hameed, Ken Perry and Joseph Lee:
- chardefs - correct title and fixed a long standing bug where dots 46 was inserted between letters (especially for web addresses).
- Fix problem with at sign.
- Removed section of accented letters, that were left behind from US table.
- Added todo for accents, to define according to the formal docs.
- Corrected mathematical forall symbol.
- Modified emphasis dot combinations to follow UEB standard.
- Corrected the display of period when used as a midword.
- Ensure ‘inin’ is correctly back-translated in words such as asinine, feminine and others.
Bulgarian bg.ctb: updated to meet modern standards (added Latin letters, corrected punctuation/mathematical symbols, misc typos). Thanks to Rumiana Kamenska
en-gb-g1.utb: Fixes thanks to Paul Wood
Fix for the lich sign in the German tables. Thanks to Halim Sahin.
Nemeth improvements thanks to John Boyer.
- Spaces in nemethdefs.cti were changed to unbreakable spaces. This was done so that nemeth expressions would not be broken between lines.
- The number sign is now inserted between the minus sign and the number at the beginning of an expression. Some problems with pass2 opcodes have also been corrected.
The Esperanto table has additional punctuation characters and a test harness. Thanks to Aaron Cannon.
Added missing symbols to the US English BRF display table. Thanks to Aaron Cannon.
Improvements to the Slovenian table and a new Slovenian eight dot computer table provided by Jožef Gregorc.
Fixes to the Norwegian tables thanks to Lars Bjørndal
- Fixes for less than / greater than.
- Add entries for URLs, domains and file names.
Added ne.utb, an alternative Nepali braille table. One of ne.utb or ne.ctb will be removed/merged in a future version. Keeping both for the time being so that users can test and give feedback on which is most correct. Thanks to Him Prasad Gautam, and Mesar Hameed

Backwards incompatible changes

Delete the table chardefs-ueb.cti as these rules are now provided by en-ueb-chardefs.uti

Invisible changes

Refactoring in compileTranslationTable.c: separated more clearly the compilation from the table resolving, removed duplicate code, etc.

Liblouis Release 2.5.3

2013-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

New features
- New Braille tables
- runHarness.py:
Braille Table Improvements
Bug Fixes
Backwards incompatible changes

New features

New Braille tables

Korean grade 1 and grade 2 thanks to Joseph Lee
U.K. English 8 dot computer braille table thanks to David Reynolds
New Russian literary and computer braille tables thanks to Igor B. Poretsky. These replace the older Russian tables which are left for backwards compatibility.
New hyphenation dictionary for Russian thanks to Igor B. Poretsky.
Updated hyphenation tables for the Norwegian language (nynorsk and bokmål) thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
New hyphenation dictionary for Esperanto thanks to Aaron Cannon.
New Esperanto grade 1 table, using the x system for accented letters, thanks to Aaron Cannon.

runHarness.py:

Accept filename globs on the commandline to run specific harness files. In tests/harness, one can do make <filename> or make runall. Removed from make check because these checks are checking the validity of our tables, rather than validity of the code.

Braille Table Improvements

da-dk-g2.ctb, mostly rewritten to use nocross and hyphenation table.
Most tables: removed the default collapse whitespace statements, if you need to compress whitespace, consider adding compress.ctb to the list of tables when processing.
Corrections to Unified English Braille Code (Grade 1 and 2), thanks to Joseph Lee
Corrections to apostrophes in the Computer Spanish 8 dots Braille table (Es-Es-G0.utb). Thanks to Juan C. Buno.
Corrections for double angle quotation marks and emphasis marks in the Norwegian Grade 0 Braille Table. Thanks to Knut Arne Bjørndal.
Fixes for a minor problem regarding the noletsign in Norwegian contracted braille. Thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Corrections to the Italian table thanks to Igor B. Poretsky.
Corrections to the Hungarian grade 1 table thanks to Hammer Attila
Corrections to English, U.S. Grade 2 (ABAE) table. Thanks to Ken Perry for reporting the bug and John J. Boyer for fixing it.
Further reorganization of the tables to remove duplication. Move litdigit opcode common parts and include where needed.
Removed obsolete en-us-g1.utb, which has been replaced by en-us-g1.ctb.
Added dictionary harness tests for: en-ueb-g2.ctb, en-us-g2.ctb.
Corrections to Nemeth character definitions thanks to Neil Soiffer.
Corrections to the Esperanto table thanks to Aaron Cannon.

Bug Fixes

Cursor position calculation is now based on the same code that calculates inpos and outpos. This probably solves a number of bugs.
Fix nocross opcode processing.
Fix several buffer over/under runs in lou_translateString.c:hyphenate.
Fix the ‘=’ problem, i.e. fix inputPositions calculation for the case where the equals sign is used as the dots operand. Thanks to Bert Frees
Fix a bug when resizing a table. Previously not all references to this table were updated.

Backwards incompatible changes

The feature that allowed a mapping between language code and Braille table was removed as it contained a out-of-bounds access bug, was never documented and probably never used. Thanks to Peter Nilsson Lundblad and Jeremy Roman for analyzing this problem and providing a patch.

Liblouis Release 2.5.2

2012-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

While initially planned as mainly a bug fix release this release contains some notable new features: There is a new tool to trace which rules have been used to perform a translation. Also along with other new tables the long awaited table for UEB is finally here.

New features
- New tool to trace rule application
- New Braille tables
Braille Table Improvements
Bug Fixes

New features

New tool to trace rule application

There is a new tool (lou_trace) which helps to trace which rules have been used to perform a Braille translation. This is helpful for writing Braille tables. See the documentation for more information.

New Braille tables

Inuktitut grade 1, thanks to Greg Kearney.
UEB grade 1 and 2, thanks to Joseph Lee. These tables replace the old UEB tables (UEBC-g1.utb and UEBC-g2.ctb).
Korean table thanks to Joseph Lee

Braille Table Improvements

da-dk-g2.ctb, fixes for transposed â, å, æ, ä, ø and ö, corrected/improved harness tests.
Corrections for en-GB-g2.ctb thanks to Paul Wood
Corrections to the Hungarian grade 1 table thanks to Hammer Attila

Bug Fixes

Update gnulib
Fix a bug in the correct opcode which causes sometimes random results when translating. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fixes for compiler warnings.
Fix some Valgrind warnings about invalid reads

Liblouis Release 2.5.1

2012-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Braille Table Improvements

Fix encoding problem in italian table and added more character definitions. Thanks to Simone Dal Maso (simone.dalmaso@juvox.it).
Rename it-it-g1.utb to it-it-comp6.utb and it-it-g1.utb2 to it-it-comp8.utb.

Bug fixes

Fix outputPos and inlen where an input character generates multiple output characters.

Liblouis Release 2.5.0

2012-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains a tremendous amount of work many developers. Many long standing bugs have been fixed. The tables can finally be in UTF-8. A grand table cleanup removed duplication from the tables. There are now two extensive test frameworks for table writers. A number of new tables have been contributed on top of the usual assortment of table improvements. Thanks to all of this liblouis has already seen quite a bit of uptake in a number of places, notably the new DAISY pipeline will ship with this release of liblouis.

NOTE: If you have private tables you might want to migrate them to utf-8. To do this just use iconv as follows:

$ iconv -f latin-1 -t utf-8 <input >output

New features
Improved the documentation
Bug fixes
Braille Table Improvements

New features

New Braille tables

Estonian grade 0, thanks to Jürgen Dengo.
Portuguese 8 dot Computer braille, Thanks to Rui Fontes

UTF-8 support in tables

Braille tables can now contain UTF-8 in the opcode arguments.

Improvements to the python bindings

All constants defined in liblouis.h are now exposed in the bindings.

Add a doctest infrastructure

These tests are based on the Python doctest framework and are only run if there is a Python interpreter on the system

Add a test harness

This test infrastructure allows the user to do table tests in a simple and concise syntax. These tests are based on the Python nose testing framework and are only run if either Python 2.x or 3.x with the related nose python module is installed on the system. See the documentation for more information. Thanks to Mesar Hameed.

Add a test harness generator

A harness generator that uses simple text files with a little formatting to help to generate the json harness files. The purpose of this tool is to make it much easier and faster to add checks for a given table. You are expected to read the generated harness file and make necessary changes, the tool only helps you to get the tests into the harness format, not check their validity.

Support for Python 3 in the Python bindings

The Python bindings now work for both Python 2 and Python 3. Thanks to Michael Whapples.

Improved C-based test framework

Improved the test framework to be able to test translations involving Unicode.
Added numerous tests, e.g. for lowercase and Unicode, for the input position, for repeated, etc.

Improved the documentation

Document the test harness (json format, fields, flags).
Document the use of Valgrind to find memory leaks
Improve the documentation on the display opcode

Bug fixes

lou_allround and lou_translate now properly handle Unicode characters
Fix some issues reported by Valgrind
Fix inputPos for situation where context and multipass opcodes are involved
Fixed a number of bugs with the letter, uppercase and lowercase opcodes when dealing with Unicode
Fixed a couple of bugs with hyphenation (documentation, Python bindings and a number of buffer overruns in the C library). Thanks Milan Zamazal (pdm@brailcom.org) for reporting this.
Fix a bug in the $a. matcher in the multipass rules where only 32 chars were matched. It now matches 0xffff chars.
Fix a bug reported by James Teh related to pass1Only

Braille Table Improvements

all table files have consistent encoding, UTF-8.
The grand table cleanup: Reorganize the tables to remove duplication. Move common parts such as Latin letter, eight and six dot digit definitions to separate files which are then included. This should ease table maintenance. Thanks to Mesar Hameed.
Fixes to de-de-comp8.ctb thanks to Aliminator83@gmail.com
hu1.ctb renamed to hu-hu-g1.ctb
hu.ctb renamed to hu-hu-comp8.ctb
eo.ctb renamed to eo-g1.ctb
Fixes to eo-g1.ctb thanks to Aaron Cannon (cannona@fireantproductions.com)
hu-hu-g1.ctb: improvements and extensive test harness, with working back-translation, Thanks to Hammer Attila
Fixes to fr-bfu-comp6.utb and fr-bfu-comp8.utb thanks to Michel Such (michel.such@free.fr)
Reworked and extended Ethiopic braille table ethio-g1.ctb, superseeds gez*, thanks to Dr. Tamru E. Belay (g.braille@sympatico.ca)
Fixes to no-no-g3.ctb thanks to Lars Bjørndal (lars@lamasti.net)

Liblouis Release 2.4.1

2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

New features

Czech hyphenation table thanks to Jan Hegr
Spanish grade 1 table provided by José Enrique Fernández del Campo and Juan Carlos Buño Suárez
New Tamil table thanks to Mesar Hameed

Braille Table Improvements

Improvements to the Portuguese grade1 braille tables
Updates and additions to Icelandic 8-dot braille table.
Improvements to the uncontracted Spanish computer braille table.
Improvements to the Norwegian braille table thanks to David Hole.

Liblouis Release 2.4.0

2012-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

New features

New Generic Farsi Grade 1 table: A new table for Generic Farsi Grade 1 braille has been provided by Mesar Hameed.
Emacs mode for editing Braille tables thanks to Christian Egli

Braille Table Improvements

Improvements to the French comp6 and comp8 braille tables
Improvements to the Romanian braille table
Improvements to the Generic Arabic Grade 1 table
Improvements to the Czech tables thanks to Jan Halousek and to Jan Hegr

Article about John J. Boyer in the The DAISY Planet

2012-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

The DAISY Planet for the month of April contains an interesting article about John J. Boyer and the Liblouis software suite.

Liblouisxml Release 2.4.0

2011-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

This release brings in the many bug fixes and feature enhancements that Bert Frees has done while working on the odt2braille Braille extension to OpenOffice.org Writer.

New features
Improvements
Bug fixes

New features

xpath expression handling

Element specifiers for semantic actions can now be defined in terms of xpath expressions

New style attributes

dontSplit + keepWithNext + orphanControl
underlinex: New style similar to italicx and boldx
heading5 … heading10: Additional heading styles
contents5 … contents10: Additional table of contents styles
centeredMargin: Prevent centered text from extending too near to the left and right edges.
dontSplit: Protect an element from being split across multiple pages.
keepWithNext: keep an element together with the first line of the next sibling.
orphanControl: Control how many lines of an element must be printed at least at the bottom of a Braille page.

New table of content parameters

printPageNumbersInContents + braillePageNumbersInContents

Many layout improvements

continuePages: Enable or disable prefixing of page numbers with a letter (a, b, c, etc.) on continued pages.
pageSeparator: Enable or disable placing of a page separator line where a print page break occurs.
pageSeparatorNumber: Enable or disable placing of page numbers with page separator lines.
ignoreEmptyPages: Empty pages can be ignored, or they can be indicated with a combined print page number.
printPageNumberRange: Show only the first print page number of a Braille page, or display the whole range of print pages contained in a Braille page.
mergeUnnumberedPages: Ignore page breaks without a page number.
pageNumberTopSeparateLine/pageNumberBottomSeparateLine: Provide a separate line for page numbers when they are placed at the top or bottom.
printPageNumbersInContents/braillePageNumbersInContents: Enable or disable print and Braille page numbers in the table of contents.

Improvements

braillePageNumberAt/printPageNumberAt: Print page numbers and Braille page numbers can now both be placed at the top or bottom together.
Improved handling of linesBefore, linesAfter, newPageBefore, newPageAfter and pagenum.

Bug fixes

Fixed table of content bugs
Fixed braille page number should only be visible on odd pages when interpoint = yes
Fixed failure when new print page starts on second last line of page
Fixed endless loop when braillePages=yes

Liblouis Release 2.3.0

2011-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains support for many more languages than before (Swedish, Kurdish, Ethiopic, Serbian, many Indian languages). The search path for tables is now a list of paths. Finally there is the usual assortment of bug fixes.

New features
Improved the documentation
Bug fixes
Braille Table Improvements

New features

Multiple table search path

The environment variable LOUIS_TABLEPATH can now contain a list of paths (separated by commas) where liblouis should look for tables. This allows the user to keep local tables.

New `--quiet` option for `lou_checktable`

lou_checktable writes to stderr even in the case of success. This can now be suppressed with the new option --quiet.

New Swedish table

A new table for Swedish braille has been provided by Samuel Thibault.

New table for Sorani (Kurdish)

A new table for Sorani (Kurdish) Braille has been donated by Peter Engström from Index Braille

New table for Ethiopic

A new table for Ethiopic Braille has been donated by Tamru E. Belay PH.D from Adaptive Technology Center for the Blind (ATCB)

New table for Serbian

A new table for Serbian Braille has been donated by Peter Engström from Index Braille

Improved the documentation

The deprecated opcodes have been moved to a separate section

Bug fixes

Fixed a long standing bug with an infinite loop in the table compiler

Braille Table Improvements

Improvements to the Chinese braille table
Improvements to the Flemish Braille Math Code tables
Improvements to the Dutch Braille tables
Improvements to the Spanish Braille tables.
Fixes for the uncontracted French 6 and 8 dot tables
Improved support for Italian 8 dot
Improvements to the Generic Arabic Grade 1 table

Liblouis Release 2.2.0

2011-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

New features
- New tables
- New functions to make libraries relocatable
Bug fixes

New features

New tables

Support for many indian languages
Support for Icelandic 6- and 8-dot
Support for Catalan
Support for Dutch Braille (for Belgium and the Netherlands)
Support for Flemish Braille Math Code (a.k.a. Woluwe code)

New functions to make libraries relocatable

Two new functions, to set the search path for tables and files. They make the library relocatable. See the in the documentation for lou_setDataPath and lou_getDataPath.

Bug fixes

Improved support for Spanish
Improved Norwegian tables

Liblouis Release 2.1.1

2010-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Bug fixes

Fixed problems with the Danish grade 2 table
Fixed problems with the Marburg maths table for mathematics and the UK maths table for mathematics

Liblouis Release 2.1.0

2010-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

New features
Bug fixes

New features

New tables

Added tables for Portuguese grade 1 and 2
Added unicode.dis for Unicode braille

Modified tables

Updated Danish tables

Implemented language to table mapping

New format of error messages

The error messages are now reported in a format similar to the one used in gcc.

New opcode

added undefined opcode

Python bindings

Allow the user to configure the maximum output length by specifying a number by which the input length is multiplied using the outlenMultiplier module variable. The default will handle the case where every input character is undefined in the translation table. Previously, this was hard-coded to 2, which was insufficient in some cases.
Add compbrlLeftCursor mode constant.
Add compileString function which wraps lou_compileString.
Corrections/clarifications to docstrings.
Add python binding for the lou_hyphenate function.
Added python wrapper for lou_backTranslateString and lou_backTranslate.

liblouisxslt as an example

Add liblouisxslt as an example to python/examples. This is basically an extension of libxslt that lets you invoke liblouis from an xslt stylesheet to do Braille translation on text nodes for example.

`compbrlLeftCursor`

Added a patch provided by Volker Bijewitz to implement compbrlLeftCursor.

Bug fixes

output `cursorPos`

Fix the output cursorPos when the compbrlAtCursor mode is enabled and the characters around the cursor translate to multiple braille cells, such as in the Chinese braille tables.

`outpos` when doing back translation

Include a patch by Timothy Lee to fix outpos when doing back translation (issue 11)

`inputPos`/`outputPos` for undefined characters

Fix the input/output position arrays for characters in the input which are undefined in the translation table.

table fixes

Fixed a bug with back translation of ‘*n’. (issue 13)
Fixes to the en-us-g2.ctb table

Python bindings

Remove unnecessary imports, allowing the bindings to run in Python 2.7. (issue 12)
lou_translate* writes output information in typeform, so allocate enough bytes for it. Fixes possible buffer overruns and resultant crashes.

Miscellaneous

Fixes to the man page generation to fix issues that were reported by the Debian packaging builder
Do not invoke help2man when cross-compiling
Documentation updates (issue 10)
Removing noletsign defaults
Many small fixes

Liblouis Release 2.0.0

2010-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

New features

New functions

Adding lou_charSize function

Liblouis Release 1.9.0

2010-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

New features

New functions

lou_dotsToChar and lou_charToDots function
Added lou_compileString for adding entries to tables at run-time.

Liblouisxml Release 2.1.0

2009-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

The main focus for this release has been the addition of user-defined styles with the associated documentation overhaul. Also there is a new tool rtf2brl and all the tools now have man pages.

New features
Bug fixes

New features

Styles

User-defined styles
styles can be nested in a document
Persistent style settings
roman page numbering

Semantic action

newentries no semantic action
linespacing semantic action

rtf2brl

There is a new tool to generate Braille from rtf.

man pages

All tools accept the --version and --help options and are documented in man pages. The tools are now licensed with GPL.

Bug fixes

The version number is now displayed correctly.

Liblouis Release 1.8.0

2009-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains a number of improvements notably the integration of gnulib, the automatic generation of man pages and the addition of tables for German grade 2.

New features
Bug fixes

New features

New tables

Tables German Grade 2
Swiss German
Swedish (1989 standard)
Swedish (1996 standard)

Modified tables

Updated Norwegian tables
Updated Chinese braille table

man pages

All tools accept the --version and --help options and are documented in man pages

Corpus based test cases for tables

You can now have corpus based tests for tables. See the README in tests/table_test_corpuses.

Bug fixes

config.h is no longer exported
Many small fixes

Liblouisxml Release 2.0.0

2009-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains support for UK and Marburg math and the usual assortment of bug fixes.

New features

Beta version of UK Maths
Alpha version of Marburg math
rpm spec file

Bug fixes

Updated semantic files
Documentation fixes
Fix for building static libs

Liblouis Release 1.7.0

2009-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

The main new feature of this release is the support for UK and Marburg math. Other changes include a new tool to check hyphenation and the usual improvement and addition of tables. Also The test suite has been enhanced and finally passes.

New features
Bug fixes

New features

New tables

Tables for UK and Marburg math
Hong Kong Cantonese
Hebrew
Hungarian
Slovene
Tibetan
Irish
Maltese

Modified tables

Updated Norwegian tables
Bug fixes in Russian tables
Updated French tables

lou_checkhyphens tool

New tool to check hyphenation

rpm spec file

Test cases for tables

The tables can now be tested with `make check’

New opcodes

noback and nofor opcode prefixes
grouping opcode
multipass subopcodes

Bug fixes

Fix for library name and Python bindings
Documentation fixes
Many small fixes

Liblouis Release 1.6.2

2009-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains a new opcode for Malaysian Braille. See the documentation for a description of the new opcode.

New features

repword opcode

The repword opcode is needed for Malaysian Braille

Liblouisxml Release 1.9.1

2009-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

This is mainly a bug fix release. We now also provide Windows binaries thanks to Michel Such.

Bug fixes

Fix the table of contents generator
Improved the documentation

Liblouis Release 1.6.1

2009-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

This is mostly a bug fix release. It contains many bug fixes that were discovered in the course of developing UK Math tables.

Bug fixes

bug fixes for correct, context and multipass opcodes
bug fixes for largesign opcode
fixed bug with French back-translation
fixed the installation path for docs
documentation improvement

Liblouisxml Release 1.9.0

2009-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

This release contains some new semantic actions and some major documentation updates.

New features

configfile and configstring semantic actions: The configfile, configstring and configtweak semantic actions enable the configuration of liblouisxml to be changed according to the contents of the document being transcribed.
Documentation up-to-date: The documentation is brought up-to-date. Specifically the semantic actions are now described in detail. Also there is now documentation about the table of contents feature.

Bug fixes

Fix a problem with -p option in xml2brl
New paths.c which finds where the program is under Windows
Added build instructions for Windows and Mac
Fix a buffer overflow in table of contents generation

Liblouis Release 1.6.0

2009-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

This release features support for Danish and Russian and updated tables for French and Norwegian. The search path for tables can now be specified using an environment variable. Finally there is the usual assortment of bug fixes.

New features
Bug fixes
Changes in behavior

New features

exactdots opcode

The exactdots opcode is intended for use in liblouisxml semantic-action files to specify exact dot patterns, as in mathematical codes.

`LOUIS_TABLEPATH` env variable

You can now specify where liblouis is to look for tables with the LOUIS_TABLEPATH environment variable.

New Tables for Danish and Russian

There is now support for Danish and Russian.

Bug fixes

Updated French and Norwegian tables
Use stdcall calling convention if building for Windows

Changes in behavior

None

Liblouisxml Release 1.8.0

2009-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

This is the first release of liblouisxml from the Google code page. It is a bug fix release to work with the latest release of liblouis.

New features

No new user visible features

Bug fixes

Search for liblouis tables under /usr/share now.

Changes in behavior

None

Liblouis Release 1.5.0

2009-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

This is a big release for liblouis. It’s the first time that it is done from the Google code page. A number of people have contributed, namely John Boyer (table debugger, bug fixes), Eitan Isaacson (Python bindings), James Teh (Python bindings, bug fixes), Christian Egli (documentation) and Michel Such (table for French grade 2).

New features
Bug fixes
Changes in behavior

New features

Python bindings

The liblouis library can now be used from Python. For more info consult the README file in the python directory.

Table debugger

liblouis now comes with a debugger that can help to find problems with translation tables.

French table for grade 2

There is now a translation table for French grade 2.

`pass1Only` mode bit

The new pass1Only mode bit will help developers of screen readers as the cursor will stay where it is expected to.

Bug fixes

Fix the inpos array values for the case where a rule has an output length which is larger than its input length.
fixed multi-word phrases
fixed bug in character display
fixed bug in findOpcodeName
lou_version now returns the correct liblouis version

Changes in behavior

None