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06 Mar 2023 - Liblouis

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

  • 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)