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Liblouis Release 3.30.0

04 Jun 2024 - Liblouis

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

  • 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