| INTRODUCTION |
| |
| Liblouis is an open-source braille translator and back-translator. It |
| features support for computer and literary braille, supports |
| contracted and uncontracted translation for many, many languages |
| (Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, |
| English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, |
| Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, |
| Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, |
| Welsh) and has support for hyphenation. New languages can easily be |
| added through tables that support a rule- or dictionary based |
| approach. Included are also tools for testing and debugging tables. |
| Liblouis also supports math braille (Nemeth and Marburg). The |
| formatting of braille is provided by the companion projects |
| liblouisxml and liblouisutdml. |
| |
| Liblouis has features to support screen-reading programs. This has led |
| to its use in two Open Source screenreaders, NVDA and Orca. It is also |
| used in some commercial assistive technology applications. |
| |
| Liblouis is based on the translation routines in the BRLTTY |
| screenreader for Linux. It has, however, gone far beyond these |
| routines. It is named in honor of Louis Braille. In Linux and Mac OSX |
| it is a shared library, and in Windows it is a DLL. |
| |
| The library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License |
| version 3 or later. See the file COPYING.LIB. |
| |
| The command line tools, are licensed under the GNU General Public |
| License version 3.0 or later. See the file COPYING. |
| |
| DOCUMENTATION |
| |
| For documentation, see the liblouis documentation (either as info |
| file, html, txt or pdf[1]) in the doc directory. For examples of |
| translation tables, see en-us-g2.ctb en-us-g1.ctb chardefs.cti, and |
| whatever other files they may include in the tables directory. This |
| directory contains tables for many languages. The Nemeth files will |
| only work with the sister libraries liblouisxml and liblouisutdml. |
| |
| INSTALLATION |
| |
| After unpacking the distribution tarball go to the directory it creates. |
| You now have the choice to compile liblouis for either 16- or 32-bit |
| unicode. By default it is compiled for the former. To get 32-bit Unicode |
| run configure with --enable-ucs4 . |
| |
| After running configure run "make" and then "make install". You must |
| have root privileges for the installation step. |
| |
| This will produce the liblouis library and the programs lou_allround, |
| lou_checkhyphens, lou_ checktable, lou_debug and lou_translate. |
| |
| If you wish to have man pages for the programs you might want to |
| install help2man before running configure. |
| |
| RELEASE NOTES |
| |
| The program lou_allround is for testing the library. It is completely |
| interactive. lou_checktable is for checking translation tables for |
| errors. lou_debug is for debugging translation tables. lou_translate |
| is for extensive testing of the translation and back-translation |
| capabilities. For more details see the liblouis documentation. |
| |
| |
| FOOTNOTES: |
| [1] You can create the pdf version of the liblouis documentation with `make pdf'. |
| |
| |
