| 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'. | |