ANNOUNCEMENT

liblouis 3.0.0.alpha1 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
3.0.0.alpha1 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 and Orca. A companion project
liblouisutdml[2] deals with formatting of braille.

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

This is the biggest release of liblouis in years. 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.

New features
~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Numerous features to support UEB properly. Thanks to Mike Gray.
  - 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.
- UTF-8 support for lou_trace thanks to Christian Egli.
- The YAML tests now allow for an optional test description. See the
  documentation for more details.

Bug fixes
~~~~~~~~~

- Stop buffer overrun in lou_getProgramPath, and also free memory
  after usage. Thanks to Michael Curran.

Other changes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- 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

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
============

This is the first in a series of alpha releases leading up to the 3.0
release which will hopefully happen before the summer holidays. There
are still a number of known outstanding issues[4] and possibly some that
we haven't discovered yet. Please help to find bugs by testing this
alpha release.

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/milestones/3.0