ANNOUNCEMENT

liblouis 3.9.0 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
3.9.0. 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 release has seen a tremendous amount of work by Bert Frees. He
was instrumental in pushing the improvements for Latvian, Norwegian
and Slovenian. But most prominently he pushed the big change for space
and control character handling through the door. These characters are
now no longer hard coded in liblouis. This should solve a few long
standing issues. Other than that there is the usual assortment of code
improvements and cleanups.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed
issues[3].

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

- None

Bug fixes
~~~~~~~~~

- Fix a problem in the callback registration in the Python bindings
  thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
- Fixed memory leaks created by block scope compound literals thanks
  to Martin Gieseking.
- The hard coded rules dealing with white space have been replaced
  with a normal table that is included in all tables. This fixes a
  number of bugs to do with space and control characters. This (big)
  change has been brewing for a couple of releases and has finally
  landed. Thanks to Christian Egli and Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Major extension of the German 8 dot computer braille table thanks to
  Ali-Riza Ciftcioglu. For example the Euro sign or quote characters
  are finally defined.
- Fix a few issues with Hungarian grade1 and grade2 Braille thanks to
  Attila Hammer.
- Various improvements to Norwegian thanks to Lars Bjørndal, Jostein
  Austvik Jacobsen, Ammar Usama and Bert Frees.
- Updates to Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille thanks to Sponge Jhan:
  Improved Braille representation of Chinese characters, and rewritten
  Kana rules using multipass statements.
- Implement the new Slovenian Braille standard thanks to Robert Merič
  and Bert Frees.
- Updates to Latvian Grade 1 Braille thanks to Artis Raugulis and Bert
  Frees.
- Fixes to English, U.S. Grade 2 (ABAE) thanks to jdatray.

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

- Don't search for tables in `/usr/local/share/liblouis/tables' (or
  the Windows equivalent) if `LOUIS_TABLEPATH' is set.
- The log levels in `liblouis.h' are no longer exposed as `LOG_FOO'
  but instead are now prefixed. So `LOG_WARN' becomes `LOU_LOG_WARN'
  for example to issue a warning from a C program using liblouis. The
  actual values remain the same, so the ABI remains stable.

Deprecation notice
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- The `locale' opcode was never implemented and was just silently
  ignored. It is now removed from the tables and and a warning will be
  issued if it is found in a table.

Backwards incompatible changes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- None

New, renamed or removed tables
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New
---

- None

Renamed
-------

- None

Removed
-------

- None

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

The next release will be published on June 3 2019 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/19?closed=1