ANNOUNCEMENT

liblouis 3.0.0 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
3.0.0. 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.

Changes in this release
=======================

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[3].

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[4].

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.

Share and Enjoy!

-- Christian Egli, on behalf of the liblouis developers

Footnotes
=========

[1]  See https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/tree/master/tables
[2]  See https://github.com/liblouis/liblouisutdml
[3]  See https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/wiki/Emphasis-Opcodes#upgrade-from-previous-versions
[4]  See https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/wiki/Licensing-of-liblouis-tables