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Liblouis Release 2.6.0

01 Sep 2014 - Liblouis

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

  • 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.