ANNOUNCEMENT

liblouis 3.18.0 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
3.18.0. The release is available for download at:

https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/releases

Introduction
============

Liblouis is an open-source braille translator and back-translator. It
features support for computer, literary and math braille, supports
contracted and uncontracted translation for many, many languages [1]_.
It plays an important role in an open source accessibility stack and is
used by screenreaders such as NVDA, Orca and JAWS. A companion project
liblouisutdml [2]_ deals with formatting of braille.

Noteworthy changes in this release
==================================

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 [3]_.

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

Next release
============

The next release will be published on September 6 2021 so please keep up
the excellent work and keep those improvements coming.

Share and Enjoy!

– Christian Egli, on behalf of the liblouis developers

Footnotes
=========

.. [1]
   https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/tree/master/tables

.. [2]
   https://github.com/liblouis/liblouisutdml

.. [3]
   https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/milestone/28?closed=1