liblouis NEWS – history of user-visible changes. -*- org -*-

Noteworthy changes in release 3.11.0 (2019-09-02)

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

New features

Enable always rules with a single character and and a single braille cell for back-translation. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Implement noUndefined mode for forward translation, thanks to Dave Mielke.
Use fallback braille representations (NABCC) for rendering undefined characters in hexadecimal notation, thanks to Dave Mielke.
Always render undefined characters, also ASCII characters, in hexadecimal notation.

Bug fixes

Don’t let a caps passage end on a word with no letters. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Handle word resets in the last word of an caps or emphasis passage if the end indicator was placed before the word. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Never convert to lowercase if capsletter is not defined. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix position mapping for back-translation when noUndefined mode is active. Thanks to Dave Mielke.
Fix bug where a translation would hang on words that match both a nocont and a repeated rule. Thanks to Dave Mielke.
Fix bug where the effect of capsnocont would leak to the next word if that word starts with a capital. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Braille table improvements

Fix an issue with ordinal numbers inside caps passages in Dutch braille. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Improved back-translation for Mongolian thanks to Angaragerdene.
Fixes to Polish grade 1 and Polish computer braille thanks to Łukasz Golonka.
Improvements to Ancient Greek braille, which has been renamed “Greek international braille”. A version with composed accents is made available as a .uti table. Thanks to Dave Mielke and Μαρια Γεωργακαράκου (Maria Georgakarakou).
Improvements and fixes to Spanish contracted braille. Details in #741. Thanks to Juan Pablo Bello.
Add a display table to match Word CX which is used in Norway and Sweden, and maybe also in other countries thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Fix handling of colon within number in Dutch braille, thanks to Jake Kyle.
Fix translation of bullet and dot operators in Dutch braille, thanks to Paul Rambags
Added North American Braille Computer Code table (en-nabcc.utb) which is the counterpart of the text_nabcc.dis display table. Thanks to Dave Mielke.
Add support for the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to the Chinese braille table, thanks to Hurt Huang and Sponge Jhan.
Unified English Braille no longer displays a single underscore when multiple underscores are in the text, thanks to André-Abush Clause.

Other changes

Metadata keys and values are now case insensitive, thanks to Dave Mielke.
Remove unicodedefs.cti. It was obsolete and never meant to be included by any tables. Instead use the online references as mentioned in the documentation now. See also #696.
lou_checkyaml test reporting has been improved, thanks to Bert Frees. For example it now has a --verbose option so that printing of expected failures can be enabled.
Hyphenation tables have been removed from tables except those needed for nocross rules, thanks to Bert Frees.
The idea is that the caller (for example odt2braille or liblouisutdml) should be able to decide for themselves which hyphenation table to use. The case in which a table contains nocross rules is an exception. In this case the hyphenation patterns are a real part of the table. Because it is not recommended to append an own hyphenation table in this case, a #-has-nocross metadata field was added to indicate that a table contains nocross rules.
lou_hyphenate can now handle more than just words (sequences of letters), e.g compound words, thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice

The noUndefinedDots mode has been renamed to noUndefined. For backwards compatibility noUndefinedDots is still available in the header file and in the Python bindings, as an alias for noUndefined.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

Invisible changes

Internally separate more clearly the display and translation phases.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

grc-international-common.uti
grc-international-composed.uti
grc-international-decomposed.uti
en-nabcc.utb

Renamed

gr-bb.ctb -> grc-international-en.utb

Removed

unicodedefs.cti
fi-fi.ctb

Noteworthy changes in release 3.10.0 (2019-06-03)

This release comes across as quiet, containing just the usual assortment of braille table improvements, cleanups, bug fixes and the classic buffer overflow patches. But beware, a lot has happened behind the scenes. Bert and Davy have been adding a new opcode to handle special emphasis situations. A number of annoying restrictions with regards to names, such as class names have been removed thank to Bert. And lastly also thanks to Bert it is now possible to define inline display tables in your YAML tests.

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

New features

Add a new opcode emphmodechars. Thanks to Bert Frees and Davy Kager.

Bug fixes

Remove memoization in checkAttr. It wasn’t implemented correctly, caused some weird bugs and probably didn’t do much for performance. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix multiple buffer overflows in compilePassOpcode. Thanks to Cheng Wen for the report and to Christian Egli for the fix.
Fix a build problem when building without libyaml thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Added modified letters to UEB thanks to Mike Gray.
Complete overhaul of the U.S. six-dot computer braille tables to align with the CBC standard thanks to Timothy Wynn. There is now a sub-table for EBAE (en-us-compbrl.uti) and a stand-alone table (en-us-comp6.ctb).
- Conforms to the CBC standard from BANA for character definitions that differ from the 8-dot ASCII braille (11 punctuation marks).
- Added rules for braille indicators, emphasis indicators, and isolated lower-cell signs to the stand-alone table.
- Uncontracted and contracted EBAE tables no longer use dot 7 when in computer braille mode.
- en-us-compbrl.ctb was deleted because it was identical to en-us-comp6.ctb.
Update Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille thanks to Sponge Jhan
- Correct various dot patterns of Chinese characters.
- Add more known pattern exceptions of Chinese characters.
- Apply word opcode to 倔 and 据.
- Change dot pattern of ＆ to 456-12346.
de-de-comp8.ctb now has definitions for musical Unicode characters thanks to Daniel Mayr
Emphasis improvements in Unified French 6 dots Braille thanks to Ludovic Oger.
Improvements to Unified English braille, Grade 2 thanks to James Datray from Freedom Scientific.
Numerous back-translation fixes to Grade 2 of UK English and Unified English Braille thanks to Anthony Tibbs.
Updates to Dutch Braille thanks to Bert Frees
- Hyphen cancels the effect of emphasis indicator
- Left/right curly brackets
- Write currency symbols in full if they come after the number

Other changes

Remove various restrictions on which characters and braille cells can be used in translation rules, thanks to Bert Frees.
Remove some code duplication in pattern.c thanks to Bert Frees
It is now also possible to define inline tables when a display table has been defined thanks to Bert Frees
Nightly snapshots of liblouis are now also built for win64 thanks to Bert Frees

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

en-us-compbrl.uti

Renamed

chardefs.cti -> en-chardefs.cti

Removed

en-us-compbrl.ctb

Noteworthy changes in release 3.9.0 (2019-03-04)

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.

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

New, renamed or removed tables

New

None

Renamed

spaces.ctb -> spaces.uti

Removed

None

Noteworthy changes in release 3.8.0 (2018-12-03)

The major focus of this release is on braille table updates. There are major updates to German, Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, Dutch, Czech, Latvian, Spanish and Ethiopic. Some of these new tables have only been possible because Bert Frees fixed some nasty long standing bugs behind the scene. Also 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.

New features

None

Bug fixes

Fix support more than 4 classes thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix capitalization of words that match nocont rules thanks to Bert Frees.

Braille table improvements

Defined the undefined character for the Czech tables thanks to Jan Hegr.
Improvements to Unified English braille thanks to Mike Gray
Updated the Dutch table to the new 2017.1 braille standard thanks to Davy Kager.
Improvements to the Polish grade 1 table, to make back-translations of diacritics working
Fixes to Latvian braille table thanks to Gatis Grintals and Artis Raugulis.
Improvements to traditional Mainland Chinese braille and two-cell Chinese Braille thanks to Sunian Loomee.
Update Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille to version 2018-11 thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan
- Correct the default braille pattern of many Chinese characters
- Add various Chinese phrases involving exceptions of braille patterns
- Modify dot patterns of dashes for readability reasons
Added a table for Turkish grade 2 thanks to Uğur Gürbüz and Simon Aittamaa
Major upgrade to the German tables. They have been upgraded to Das System der deutschen Brailleschrift (2018). They are much smaller now as they are based on lou_maketable. As they now work for any locale (be it Switzerland or Germany) they have been merged into one set of tables for the different grades. Thanks to Christian Waldvogel.
New table for Arabic contracted braille thanks to Ikrami Ahmad.
New table for Arabic computer braille thanks to Ikrami Ahmad.
Improvements to Arabic uncontracted braille thanks to Ikrami Ahmad.
Improvements to Ethiopic thanks to Tamru E. Belay.
New table for Spanish contracted braille thanks to Juan Pablo Bello.

Other changes

Updated the lou_allround and lou_trace test tools to include all the mode flags described in the documentation of the lou_translateString() function, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

The pass1Only flag has been deprecated for a while and is now removed from the code, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

tr-g2.ctb
ar-ar-g2.ctb
ar-ar-comp8.utb
es-g2.ctb

Renamed

de-de-accents.cti -> de-accents.cti
de-de-g0.utb -> de-g0.utb
de-de-g1.ctb -> de-g1.ctb
de-de-g2.ctb -> de-g2.ctb
de-ch-g0.utb -> de-g0.utb
de-ch-g1.ctb -> de-g1.ctb
de-ch-g2.ctb -> de-g2.ctb

Removed

ar-fa.utb
Es-Es-g1.utb

Noteworthy changes in release 3.7.0 (2018-09-03)

This release implements major improvements for back-translation thanks to concerted efforts by Bue Vester-Andersen, Bert Frees, Timothy Lee and others. In particular the input/output positions are now correct also for back-translation. There are new and improved Chinese Braille tables and some long awaited improvements to UEB. The release also has some code cleanups and documentation improvements.

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

New features

Added a new opcode midendnumericmodechars. Characters defined with this opcode can appear in the middle or at the end of a number without canceling numeric mode. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Bug fixes

Fix another stack-based buffer overflow in input parsing reported by Henri Salo thanks to Christian Egli.
Fix input/output positions for back-translation. Thanks to excellent bug reports and patches by Timothy Lee, Bert Frees heroically sat down and reworked the handling of the input/output positions for back-translation. This solves numerous issues with backward translation.
The returned inlen and outlen now always match thanks to the above work on input/output positions by Bert Frees.
Major improvements in the back-translation of capitalized words (capsword) in conjunction with punctuation and numbers. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen
Fixed a problem in the back-translation of numbers in conjunction with punctuation and letters. Thanks to Rimas Kudelis and Bue Vester-Andersen
Fix a buffer overflow in matchCurrentInput. Thanks to Hongxu Chen for reporting and to Christian Egli for fixing it.

Braille table improvements

Danish grade 2 tables: Reduced hyphenation to only the hyphens necessary for correct Braille translation. Replaced the longer rules with hyphenation for better cursor positioning. Corrected some words. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
New Chinese Mandarin Braille Codes (Grade 1) and (Grade 2) thanks to Sunian Loomee. The first one is for Chinese Common Braille, commonly known as the old Braille where a Chinese character is composed of three Braille Symbols, consonants, vowels and tones. The second table is for Chinese double spelling Braille, commonly known as the new Braille where Chinese character is composed of two Braille Symbols, consonants and vowels, ( the tones are included in vowels ).
Major update to the Urdu tables thanks to Jake Kyle.
Back-translation of numbers in Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, and Swedish has been fixed thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Improvements to UEB such as handling of BLT, BLVD and LLC, number sign placement, final-letter groupsign usage and final-letter back-translation thanks to Mike Gray.
Significant changes to Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille. Among other things there is now complete the support of CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A and some symbols were added for Nemeth. Thanks to Sponge Jhan and 黃偉豪. With this change we can now properly handle duoyinzi, Chinese words that have more than one pronunciation. The granularity of the cursor movement can now reflect positions of all Chinese characters.

Other changes

Added documentation of opcodes which were previously introduced as part of the UEB work. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Test suite improvements: In addition to checking the translation the tests now also check if the provided inlen is the same as the returned inlen and retry the test with a larger output buffer.
Fix a problem in the Makefiles that prevented liblouis from being built with automake 1.16. This is fixed now thanks to a patch from Samuel Thibault.
Removal of the code for the scripting language for multipass opcodes. This code was originally introduced in 2012 but never documented. Consequently it was never used. Meanwhile the original code for multipass opcodes was much improved. So there is no more need for this (duplicate) code and we are removing it.
The nightly snapshots of pre-built windows binaries are now built with UCS4 enabled.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

zhcn-g1.ctb
zhcn-g2.ctb

Renamed

None

Removed

Tables that are only useful in the context of liblouisutdml were moved there

marburg.ctb
marburg_edit.ctb
nemeth.ctb
nemeth_edit.ctb
ukmaths.ctb
ukmaths_edit.ctb
wiskunde-translation.cti
wiskunde.ctb

Noteworthy changes in release 3.6.0 (2018-06-04)

This release contains the usual assortment of braille table improvements, cleanups and bug fixes. The most prominent change is the refactoring of the call APIs by Bert Frees that makes the code much more manageable and solid and will help us in the future to evolve the library.

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

New features

Add metadata fields name and display-name to tables thanks to Bert Frees. The name contains a description of the table in the native language. display-name contains an English description.
YAML test enhancements
- You can now test both forward and backwards translation with in the same YAML file and for the same set of tables tests thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen. See the documentation for the bothDirections testmode.
- Add maxOutputLength option in YAML tests.

Bug fixes

Fix a bunch of buffer overflow errors in table parsing thanks to Samuel Thibault and Christian Egli (CVE-2018-11410 and CVE-2018-11440).
Fix input-output mapping of context rules thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix back tracking with all caps words thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix context rules with lookback thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix a memory leak in default table resolver thanks to Timothy Lee.
Fix an array out of bounds error which caused a crash on i386 thanks to Samuel Thibault.
Fix numerous stack-based buffer overflow in table parsing reported by Henri Salo and Edward-L thanks to Christian Egli (CVE-2018-11577, CVE-2018-11683, CVE-2018-11684 and CVE-2018-11685).

Braille table improvements

Fix some forward- and back-translation errors in Unified French Grade 2 thanks to André-Abush Clause.
Updates to the Simplified-Chinese Braille Translation Table thanks to Roshanson
- Added many polygraphs to distinguish different meanings of a word
- Letter identifiers have been modified. In China’s school for the blind, when many visually impaired students learn, the lowercase letters often do not have to mark the identifiers deliberately. So in this version, we this item has been deleted.
- Fixed a bug in the braille code that revises the space and 0
Updates to Bopomofo-based Chinese Braille Table thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan
- Redefine some Chinese words and phrases
- Add various Nemeth symbols such as arrows and parenthesis
- Complete the support of CJK Compatibility block
- Fix the support of various parentheses, brackets, and braces
- Minor fixes (kana rules, punctuation marks, Greek alphabets)
New 8 dot computer braille table for Czech thanks to Jan Hegr.
Fixes to Czech 6 dot table thanks to Jan Hegr
- Fixed curly brackets representation
- Fixed number sign representation
- Added copyright sign
Minor fixes to Hebrew thanks to Erez Kugler.

Other changes

Refactoring thanks to Bert Frees
- Simplify the emphasis class handling by combining all related vars in a struct EmphasisClass
- Simplify input/output buffer handling
- Combine emphasisBuffer and transnoteBuffer
- Group match related vars in a struct PassRuleMatch
- Remove dead code
Fixed many warnings thanks to Christian Egli

Deprecation notice

The mode parameter in lou_dotsToChar never had any effect and is now deprecated.
In 2012 a new way to specify the test and action part in context and multipass opcodes was introduced. It was never documented and has no known usage in the wild. However it opens up the attack surface to the table parsing code. Therefore it is deprecated and will be removed in the next release.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

cs-comp8.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

Cz-Cz-g1.utb

Noteworthy changes in release 3.5.0 (2018-03-05)

This release has a number of Braille table improvements, cleanups and meta data enhancements. The most prominent new feature however is probably the much improved test coverage. This has helped in tracing and fixing a number of long standing bugs.

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

New features

The same name can now be used in more than one class rule. The effect is that both set of characters become part of that one class.

Bug fixes

Fix a regression in inputPositions thanks to Bert Frees
Treat characters within the range compbrlStart and compbrlEnd as a special case. This fixes many if not most of the problems with cursor position and the compbrlAtCursor mode. Thanks to Dave Mielke.
Fix swapdd opcode thanks to Bert Frees
Fix negation of attribute matcher in multipass expressions thanks to Bert Frees

Braille table improvements

Add a display table that maps braille dots to brl/brf character set. For an in depth explanation see the corresponding github issue. Thanks to Rimas Kudelis
Major Improvements to Unified French Grade 2 thanks to André-Abush Clause
Fix braille number input for Greek Braille thanks to Dave Mielke
Add a fix for “phad” according to UEB Rule 10.7.3 thanks to Anthony Tibbs
Updates to the Urdu tables thanks to Jake Kyle from Compass Braille
Updates to the Chinese braille table (zh-tw.ctb) thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan
IPA.utb now contains a more complete list of phonetic symbols, including some that might conflict with other tables. For this reason it is not suitable for inclusion in other tables. A separate table IPA-unicode-range.uti has been added for this purpose. Thanks to Ludovic Oger.
The Mongolian table has been improved and there is now also support for grade 2 thanks to Tsengel Maidar.
Minor updates to the Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen
Fix back translation of numbers in Dutch, Finnish and Canadian French, thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
New table for Ukrainian thanks to Sergiy Moskalets.

Other changes

Improved documentation

Extend the documentation on multipass opcodes. Thanks to Dave Mielke and Christian Egli.
Remove the deprecation note of the ‘=’ dots operand. While there are still problems with back-translation we will not remove support for it. See also the discussion in the github issue.

Improved meta data information in tables

The meta data in the tables such as locale, contraction grade, etc has been improved and is now also used when testing from a YAML test. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Major overhaul of the YAML test suite

Support for proper testing of cursor positions

Due to problems in the cursor position computation the YAML test suite was improved to support proper testing of cursor position also in combination with input, output position and modes. In essence all of the liblouis API is now supported and can be tested via the YAML tests. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Support for table selection via meta data query

The tables to be tested can now be specified via a meta data query in addition to specifying them by filename. See the documentation for more details. Internally the YAML tests have been split up into tests that test the braille translation for a particular locale (now located in tests/braille_specs) and tests that check a specific feature of liblouis. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice

None

Backwards incompatible changes

The translation mode comp8Dots has been removed as it was never really implemented anyway
Support for the pass1Only flag has now been removed. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
The old UEB tables UEBC-g1.ctb and UEBC-g2.ctb have been removed as the have been superseded by en-ueb-g1.ctb and en-ueb-g2.ctb.
The french tables fr-2007.ctb, fr-fr-g1.utb, fr-fr-g2.ctb, fr-ca-g1.utb and fr-ca-g2.ctb have been removed. Use fr-bfu-comp6.utb for 6 dots literary, fr-bfu-comp8.utb for 8 dots computer and fr-bfu-g2.ctb for contracted braille instead.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

IPA-unicode-range.uti
mn-MN-g2.ctb
uk.utb

Renamed

mn-MN.utb -> mn-MN-g1.utb

Removed

fr-2007.ctb
fr-ca-g1.utb
Fr-Ca-g2.ctb
fr-fr-g1.utb
Fr-Fr-g2.ctb
UEBC-g1.ctb
UEBC-g2.ctb

Noteworthy changes in release 3.4.0 (2017-12-04)

This release brings together a lot of work by lots of different people. Probably the most prominent fix is the work on output positions by Bue and Bert. NVDA should benefit from this. Then there are new and massively improved tables like the Lithuanian 6-dot table by Rimas or the improved back-translation for French by Michel and André-Abush to name just a few. There are too many contributors to name them here, thanks to them all.

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

New features

Add support for inputPos and outputPos checking in lou_checkyaml thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen. See the manual for details and examples.

Bug fixes

output positions (outputPos) are now calculated based on input positions (inputPos) thanks to Bert Frees. This avoids a whole class of bugs that previously plagued the output positions. This fix also obviates the need for the pass1Only flag. See below for the deprecation notice.

Braille table improvements

Addition of Nemeth and Kangxi radical characters and other improvements to Chinese braille (zh-tw.ctb) thanks to Bo-Cheng Jhan and 黃偉豪.
Improvements to the Spanish chardefs table thanks to Luis Lorente Barajas and Simon Aittamaa.
Fixed a lowercase ó in Spanish first reported for NVDA thanks to Sukil Etxenike.
New Norwegian 6-dot display braille table for Braillo embossers thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Added a bunch of whitespace-like codepoints as spaces thanks to Rimas Kudelis
Added Lithuanian 6-dot table thanks to Rimas Kudelis.
Addition of more characters to the French tables thanks to Samuel Thibault
Improvements to the Hungarian tables thanks to Attila Hammer
Improvements to the Mongolian tables thanks to Tsengel Maidar
Fix some math signs in Czech Braille (cs-chardefs.cti). Thanks to Christian Herden of ViewPlus for reporting this.
Updates to the SEB British Braille Tables thanks to Paul Wood
Massive improvements to French back-translation thanks to Michel Such and André-Abush Clause

Other changes

Improved documentation

Bue Vester-Andersen added some notes about back-translation and documented all possible values of the mode parameter. Also the description of decpoint and litdigit was improved.
The match opcode is now documented thanks to Mike Gray and Christian Egli.

lou_maketable

Numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements thanks to Bert Frees

Code refactoring

Many global variables have been removed thanks to Bert Frees

Code formatting

Thanks to clang-format There is now a uniform coding style over the whole code base

Fix broken NMakefile

Thanks to Davy Kager building with nmake should work again

Deprecation notice

The pass1Only flag has been deprecated. Its use should be avoided, and it will be completely removed from the code in the next version of Liblouis. When using the pass1Only flag in this release you will get a warning.

Backwards incompatible changes

None

New, renamed or removed tables

New

no-no-braillo-047-01.dis
lt-6dot.utb

Renamed

None

Removed

None

Noteworthy changes in release 3.3.0 (2017-09-04)

This release brings a slew of Braille table improvements, fixes a number of security related bugs and introduces a new tool to generate liblouis Braille tables based on a corpus of know good Braille translations. For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

New features

maketable tool

A new tool lou_maketable enables the creation of tables based on a corpus of known good Braille translations. This has huge potential to simplify table maintenance for tables that have so far been dominated by large exception lists. Thanks to Bert Frees.

Meta data query API

A new API and a corresponding command line tool to query table meta data thanks to Bert Frees

Bug fixes

Back translation

UEB grade 2
- Fix back-translation of whole word contractions followed by other contractions thanks to James Teh.
- Fix back-translation for contractions followed by punctuation thanks to James Teh.

Security

Fix a number of CVEs (illegal address access, buffer overflow and use-after-free or in terms of CVEs: CVE-2017-13738, CVE-2017-13739, CVE-2017-13740, CVE-2017-13741, CVE-2017-13742 and CVE-2017-13744) thanks to Mike Gorse.
Fix CVE-2017-13743 thanks to Christian Egli.

Braille table improvements

New table for Croatian grade 1 Braille thanks to Zlatko Sobočan.
Fixes and tests for Slovak Braille thanks to Simon Aittamaa
Numerous fixes in the character definitions of the Spanish tables thanks to Simon Aittamaa
Unified French 6 dots and 8 dots improvements for back-translation thanks to Michel Such
Updates to the Chinese braille table thanks to Coscell Kao
Updates to Nemeth character definitions thanks to Attila Hammer
The Hungarian tables now conform to the new 2017 standard thanks to Attila Hammer

Backwards incompatible changes

The constant otherTrans has been removed in both the C API and the corresponding Python bindings.
The constants ucBrl, noUndefinedDots and partialTrans have different values now in both the C API and the corresponding Python bindings.

New, renamed or removed tables

New

hr-g1.ctb

Renamed

hr.ctb -> hr-comp8.utb

Removed

Noteworthy changes in release 3.2.0 (2017-06-06)

Aside from the usual improvements to Braille tables this release focuses on improving the internal infrastructure. Numerous bugs have been fixed, the CI infrastructure also checks mingw builds now and MSVC compatibility has been massively improved. For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed issues.

Bug fixes

Fix capsnocont opcode. Also mark capital letters with capsletter symbol when capsnocont is defined but no begcapsword indicator is defined. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Fix the syllable opcode. It had been broken under some circumstances since 3.0. Thanks to Bert Frees and Christian Egli.

Other changes

Fix building of Python bindings when cross-compiling. Thanks to Chris Brannon
lou_checkyaml is now only installed if libyaml is available. Thanks to Christian Egli
Major internal changes to improve MSVC compatibility. Thanks to Davy Kager
Enhance documentation on usage of display tables in particular in conjunction with Unicode dot patterns. Thanks to Bert Frees

Braille table improvements

Improvements to the Swedish 8-dots table (se-se.ctb) thanks to Kevin Derome
Improvements to the Simplified-Chinese Braille table thanks to Roshanson
Fixes for the International Phonetic Alphabet Braille table thanks to Ludovic Oger
Added more Unicode symbols (fractions and not equal) to the UEB tables. Thanks to Paul Wood and James Bowden.
Fixes to UEB grade 2 (en-ueb-g2.ctb) thanks to Mike Gray.
Vastly improved Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
- New literary tables for 6 dots, mainly for embossing (no back-translation).
- Improved back-translation in 6 dots tables, all grades.
- New support for many Unicode characters in all 6 dots tables.
- Strengthened internal tests to prevent breaking of tables due to changes in the code.
- Fixed 8 dots tables which were broken in the previous version.
New Braille tables for Sinhala script thanks to Ashoka Bandula Weerawardhana.
New Hungarian grade 2 Braille table thanks to Attila Hammer.
Improvements to UEB in particular to symbols specified mostly on the Appendix 3 (Symbols List) from the Rules of Unified English Braille Second Edition 2013 document thanks to Victor Montalvão.
Improvements to Persian 8 dot computer Braille table thanks to Mohammadreza Rashad.

Backwards incompatible changes

The old Greek table gr-gr-g1.utb is gone. Use el.ctb instead
The doctests are gone. They have been superseded by the YAML tests.
The internal API which was previously in louis.h has been made internal, i.e. the file is renamed to internal.h and the function names are prepended with underscores (‘_’).

New, renamed or removed tables

New

sin.cti
sin.utb
hu-hu-g2.ctb (new)
da-dk-6miscChars.cti (new)
da-dk-g16-lit.ctb (new)
da-dk-g26-lit.ctb (new)
da-dk-g26l-lit.ctb (new)

Renamed

gr-gr-g1.utb (removed and replaced by el.ctb)

Removed

da-chardefs6.cti
da-dk-common6.uti
da-dk-g26-patches.cti
da-dk-g2core.cti
da-dk-nocaps.uti

Noteworthy changes in release 3.1.0 (2017-03-06)

An influx of new contributors have made sure that liblouis continues to improve. Back translation has seen major improvements, there are some additional modes to help screen readers, for many tables meta data has been added, the Python bindings are more robust, Windows support has been improved, the YAML test suite has been generalized and as usual new and improved braille tables have been included. On the licensing front we managed to get almost all tables re-licensed to LGPLv2.1+.

New features

Meta data

Most of the translation tables now contain meta data. This makes them discoverable. Programs can use the lou_findTable function to find a table based on a query.

noUndefinedDots mode

Add a noUndefinedDots mode to disable the output of dot numbers when back-translating undefined patterns. Thanks to James Teh.

When back translating input from a braille keyboard cell by cell, it is desirable to output characters as soon as they are produced. Similarly, when back translating contracted braille, it is desirable to provide a “guess” to the user of the characters they typed. To achieve this, liblouis needs to have the ability to produce no text when indicators (which don’t produce a character by themselves) are not followed by another cell. This works already for indicators liblouis knows about such as capital sign, number sign, etc., but it does not work for indicators which are not (and cannot be) specifically defined as indicators. For example, in UEB, dots 4 5 6 alone produces the text “\456/”. Setting the noUndefinedDots mode suppresses this dot number output.

partialTrans mode

Add a partialTrans mode to specify that back-translation input should be treated as an incomplete word. Thanks to James Teh.

If this mode is set, rules that apply only for complete words or at the end of a word will not take effect. This is intended to be used when translating input typed on a braille keyboard to provide a rough idea to the user of the characters they are typing before the word is complete.

YAML test framework

The YAML framework has been extended and is much more useful now. You can test multiple tables within one YAML file, you can define test tables directly inline and you can test multiple tables using the same test data. Refer to the documentation for the details.

If really not wanted the YAML tests can be disabled by specifying configure --without-yaml.

Bug fixes

Fixes implicit declaration of ‘pattern_check’ thanks to Reiner Dolp
Fix a stackoverflow crash on applications with smaller stack size. Thanks to Victor Montalvão.
Fix the \v escape sequence. Thanks to Davy Kager.
The Python bindings now give a helpful error if liblouis has been compiled with a different character size than Python. Thanks to Matt Wenn.
Massive bug fixes in multipass rules. Dave Mielke has done a tremendous job improving the multipass machinery also in the context of back-translation. Where needed nofor/noback has been added to the multipass rules.

Other changes

Improvements to the Emacs mode for editing liblouis tables thanks to Christian Egli
Documenting lou_charSize thanks to Reiner Dolp
Support for relative table paths in the tests. This will make sure you always know which table a test actually uses.
Infrastructure to build windows binaries in a Docker container, thanks to Bert Frees

Braille table improvements

UEB improvements, thanks to Mike Gray
- Fixed apostrophe and back translation
- Added rules for Unicode apostrophe handling
- Improvements to UEB and Nemeth math
Complete overhaul of Lithuanian 8-dots table, thanks to Rimas Kudelis
New Urdu 6 Dot Grade 1 and 2 Braille tables thanks to Jake Kyle
Improvements to Italian 8 dots computer braille, thanks to Simone Dal Maso.
New table unicode-braille.utb that helps to back translate braille input to Unicode braille output, thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
Improvements to the Chinese braille table thanks to Coscell Kao.
New Turkish braille table for grade 1 that should replace the old tr.ctb table, thanks to Arend Arends.
New Persian grade 1 table and 8-dots computer table thanks to Mohammadreza Rashad.
New table for the International Phonetic Alphabet thanks to Ludovic Oger
Fixes for the French 6 and 8 dots tables thanks to Michel Such. Some errors have been fixed and many Unicode characters have been added.
Add an extended 8-dot computer braille table for U.S. English thanks to Davy Kager. The table is tailored for use on Windows (CP-1252) and uses dot patterns from Windows screen readers, but should be useful on other platforms too.
New Greek table that is better than the existing Greek Grade 1 Braille Table (gr-gr-g1.utb) thanks to Dave Mielke.
Improved number back-translations on fr-fr-g1 and vi-g1 tables thanks to Victor Montalvao.
New Chinese Braille table for use in the mainland of China thanks to Kaifang Bao of RejoinTech.
The Black Circle character is commonly used for displaying password characters. The absence of its definition leads to users not being able to know how many characters were typed in such fields. This has been improved for many tables thanks to Victor Montalvao.

License changes

DocArch has agreed to re-license their tables, so we have 8 more tables under the LGPLv2.1+.

Backwards incompatible changes

The naming in the YAML test framework has changed slightly from `tables:` to `table:`.

Noteworthy changes in release 3.0.0 (2016-07-14)

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.

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.

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.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.5 (2015-12-1)

This minor release introduces new tables (Mongolian and Norwegian 8 dot) and new features to the tracing tool. But the most exiting news about this release is probably the fact that 12 developers have contributed to it, showing how widely used liblouis is and how actively the development progresses.

New features

A DEF file is now generated automatically for the windows builds. Thanks to Christian Egli
lou_trace supports backtranslation now. Thanks to Bert Frees

Bug fixes

Fix a bug in the findtable code. Thanks to Michael Katzmann for the report.
Fix some compile time warnings on Windows, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Fixes to the logging code by Arend Arends.

Other changes

Add test data for EUB symbols, thanks to Paul Wood
Clean up dead code i.e. remove support for (undocumented) nobreak opcode. Thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Braille table improvements

New Mongolian table thanks to Tsengel Maidar and Sreeja Param.
Improvements to the Chinese braille table thanks to Coscell Kao.
Massive improvements to Norwegian, thanks to Lars Bjørndal, Ammar Usama and Jostein Austvik Jacobsen. They added a 8 dot table and lots of test data.
Improvements to Hungarian, thanks to Attila Hammer

Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.4 (2015-08-31)

This is a minor release in terms of features. But in terms of test coverage and stability it is a vast improvement over previous versions of Liblouis. The new YAML based test suite contains more than a million of validated translations. Every change in Liblouis is tested against this corpus ensuring the change doesn’t break anything.

New features

YAML based harness tests. Harness tests can now be written in simple YAML notation and they are integrated with the normal `make check` command. They can be used for both ucs2 and ucs4 and no Python is required. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Bug fixes

Use a separate gnulib instance for the library and the tools. Use the strndup module to avoid build problems on windows.
Fix a problem with the nocross opcode when used in combination with the opcodes nocont and compbrl, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.
Fix a problem with the decoding of the harness test files. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fix numerous problems in the way braille indicators are handled. There is now a safe version of the checkAttr function which makes sure that no attributes are checked beyond the boundaries of the currentInput. This fixes the random behavior with tests where the emphasis extends to the end of the input string. Thanks to Christian Egli.

Other changes

if found use texi2any to build the documentation, thanks to Martin Michlmayr.
Fix permissions of Korean tables, thanks to Peter Lundblad.
Update the windows build instructions, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to Hungarian, thanks to Attila Hammer
Improvements to Hungarian 8 dot and Serbian grade 1, thanks to Zvonimir Stanecic

Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.3 (2015-06-01)

Given the release number you might think this is only a minor release. However looking at the number of developers who contributed to it and the number of pull requests and issues that were solved this turns out to be a very impressive and solid release. Most prominently we have a new function to discover tables based on meta data in table headers. Also makeinfo is no longer required to build liblouis. And lastly we have numerous improvements in Braille tables such as Korean, Vietnamese and UEB to name just a few.

New features

[beta] The new function lou_findTable can be used for table discovery based on meta data in table headers. Thanks to Bert Frees.
The Python API now has a new function to check tables aptly named checkTable. Thanks to Davy Kager.

Bug fixes

Fixed a problem in resolveTable when using a Java resolver, thanks to Bert Frees

Other changes

The build dependency on makeinfo is now optional. If it is not installed we simply do not build the documentation.

Braille table improvements

Improvements to Bengali, Devanagari, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, Telugu and Oriya, thanks to Sreeja Param
Corrections and improvements made to en-GB tables thanks to Paul Wood
Vast restructuring to Korean tables. In 2006 the Institute for Korean Braille modified some dots in Korean Braille. Specifically, some punctuation dots are now based on English. To accommodate this change and to retain the old tables, the Korean table set was revised as follows:
- Added three files: ko-chars, the Korean characters dictionary, and rules for g1 and g2.
- ko-g1 and ko-g2 are now interface files that includes needed files.
- Added three files for Korean Braille 2006 revision along with a test harness.
New table for Polish 8 dot computer braille. Thanks to Karol Pecyna.
New table for Vietnamese 6 dot. Thanks to Harri Pasanen.
Corrections and improvements made to UEB tables thanks to Paul Wood
- Typeform passage indicators
- Degree sign
- Dash signs
- Math signs
- Accent modifiers
- Accented letters

Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.2 (2015-03-02)

This release, which was mostly pushed out the door by Bert and Mesar, fixes a long standing emphasis bug, adds more functionality to the harness test suite and improves, as usual, on Braille tables. Notably there is a brand new finish table backed by Celia.

New features

Harness tests now can test for typeform differences.

Bug fixes

Fix for emphasis bug, thanks to Michael Gray

Braille table improvements

Correction to comments in Norwegian generic tables, thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Corrections to dot patterns in no-no-g0.utb thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Corrections and additional test cases for Hungarian grade 1, thanks to Hammer Attila.
New 6-dot table for Finnish thanks to Jukka Eerikäinen from Celia. The existing tables for Finnish were 8-dot, but there is an official specification only for 6-dot braille in Finnish.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.1 (2014-12-01)

This release focuses on table and documentation improvements. The documentation has been restructured to cater to people starting with writing Braille tables. End users will see improvements to Braille for Danish, Dutch, Hungarian, Irish and UK English.

New features

New Braille tables

New grade 1 and grade 2 Gaeilge tables implementing the 2014 UIB standard. Including tests, thanks to Ronan McGuirk, Mesar Hameed.

Braille table improvements

Updates and correction to Hungarian braille tables, thanks to Hammer Attila.
Correction to English UK grade 2 braille tables and new tests, thanks to Paul Wood, Mesar Hameed
Vastly improved Danish tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen
- back-translation, both in 6 dots grade 2 and 8 dots grade 2.
- Better handling of dash, slash, and other punctuation within words in 8 dots grade 2.
New table for Dutch (Netherlands) thanks to Henri Apperloo from CBB

Bug fixes

fix a compiler warning in the logging code. Thanks Peter Lundblad for reporting it and Michael Whapples for fixing the problem.

Documentation updates

The documentation has been restructured to be more beginner friendly and a short introduction to translation table writing has been added. Thanks to Joseph Lee and Christian Egli

Other changes

When compiling with mingw or cygwin resulting dll is liblouis.dll.
runHarness.py: add new output format, compact output mode suitable for grepping.

Backwards incompatible changes

Deleted ga.ctb now superseded by ga-g1.utb and ga.g2.ctb.
Nl-Nl-g1.utb has been removed. It is superseded by nl-NL-g1.ctb.
nl-be-g1.utb has been removed. It is superseded by nl-BE-g1.ctb.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.0 (2014-09-01)

This is the first release by the new maintainer team. A lot of work by people from across the community contributed to this release. There are massive additions and updates to the Braille tables (e.g. Afrikaans, Hebrew, many Indian languages, Korean) and also changes to the C API to enable call backs for error messages and warnings.

New features

New Braille tables

Tables for Afrikaans, Cherokee, Hawaiian, Maori, Sotho and Tswana were donated by Greg Kearney. Afrikaans, Cherokee, Maori and Hawaiian all are grade 1 tables and with the exception of Cherokee were derived from World Braille Usage 2013. The Cherokee was taken from the specification published at www.cbtbc.org/cherokee/.

Logging callback

There is now a callback system in place to get error messages and warnings. This can be used from programs that use liblouis to log warnings for example.

Bug fixes

fix back translation problems when word gets split in unusual places causing back translation of whole words for example K5 back translates to Knowledgeen, M>k back translates to Moreark, and M5 back translates to Moren. This caused over 8400 extra back translation errors in en-us-g2 and 5000 in en-ueb-g2. Thanks to Ken Perry.
Fixed bug to prevent removal of \xffff between largesign rules. This solves a Liblouisutdml bug where \xffff is used as a segment delimiter.
Fixed a bug in back translation, when a letsign was encountered, the letsign was being applied beyond the element it applied to.
Fix memory leaks in the default table resolver introduced in the previous release.
Fixes to the build system by Simon Aittamaa

Braille table improvements

Major improvements to Indian tables thanks to the Indian National Institute for Visually Handicapped, in particular Dipendra Manocha, Mesar Hameed, Dinesh Kaushall and Sreeja Parameswaran:
- Corrected opcodes for letters, punctuation marks, digits, signs etc.
- Updated braille codes according to prescribed braille codes for each Unicode character by the Braille Council of India for all Indian languages.
- defined rules for dealing with Nukhta character in Hindi table
- defined rule to insert dot-1 between consonant followed by full vowel character in all Indian Languages
- defined rules for shifting of halant character before the consonant. This character is placed after the consonant in normal typing but need to be before the consonant in braille. This rule is applicable for all Indian languages.
- defined rules for two conjunct characters “ksha and gya” used in all Indian Languages for which there are specific codes in Braille.
New Hebrew table that is based on the new unified Hebrew Braille code standard that was put together on January 2014 after a conference with all of the specialists in this field in Israel. It includes improved representation of Hebrew letters, special letters that are called Nikud, and punctuation symbols. The old Braille standard is not relevant any more. Thanks to Adi Kushnir.
UEB table fixes: Fix ity contraction, fixed the missing end word contraction ;n ;d sign 46. thanks to Ken Perry.
Fix for Norwegian where letsign is affecting some extra characters thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Much improved hyphenation for Norwegian thanks to Lars Bjørndal
Korean Grade 2 now includes support for reading English text using grade 2.
en-us-g1.ctb and en-ueb.g1.ctb are now able to display 8 dot Unicode braille.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.4 (2014-03-03)

This release contains nine months worth of braille table improvements for example for Danish, UEB, en-us, Nemeth, Bulgarian, Slovenian and many more. Also there are fixes to the core for table path resolving and back-translation.

New features

Added function lou_registerTableResolver for plugging in a table resolver callback from your host language.

Bug fixes

Fixed ENDSEGMENT indicator in computer Braille thanks to John Boyer.
Emphasized words should now be contracted consistently thanks to John Boyer.
Fixed several problems with back-translation. A slash within a number and strings such as 5-inch-diameter and 25-year-old-man should now back-translate correctly. Thanks to John Boyer.
Fixed a problem with syllable opcode. Thanks to John Boyer.
Fix warnings with gcc 4.8.2. Thanks to Peter Lundblad.
When a table is specified with an absolute or relative path, the “includes” in that table will now work as expected, meaning files in the same directory will be found.

Braille table improvements

fr-bfu-comp8.utb: corrections, zero was wrongly displayed in some instances.
en-us-g2.ctb, en-ueb-g2.ctb: Fixes for that’s, can’t and s’ thanks to Ken Perry.
en-us-g2.ctb: Fix for back-translation of things like http://address.com, words including after, capsigns. thanks to Ken Perry.
Further corrections and testcases to the Hungarian tables thanks to Hammer Attila
Fixed letter sign in en-us and en-ueb tables. Thanks to John Boyer and Ken Perry.
UEB Fixes thanks to Mesar Hameed, Ken Perry and Joseph Lee:
- chardefs - correct title and fixed a long standing bug where dots 46 was inserted between letters (especially for web addresses).
- Fix problem with at sign.
- Removed section of accented letters, that were left behind from US table.
- Added todo for accents, to define according to the formal docs.
- Corrected mathematical forall symbol.
- Modified emphasis dot combinations to follow UEB standard.
- Corrected the display of period when used as a midword.
- Ensure ‘inin’ is correctly back-translated in words such as asinine, feminine and others.
Bulgarian bg.ctb: updated to meet modern standards (added Latin letters, corrected punctuation/mathematical symbols, misc typos). Thanks to Rumiana Kamenska
en-gb-g1.utb: Fixes thanks to Paul Wood
Fix for the lich sign in the German tables. Thanks to Halim Sahin.
Nemeth improvements thanks to John Boyer.
- Spaces in nemethdefs.cti were changed to unbreakable spaces. This was done so that Nemeth expressions would not be broken between lines.
- The number sign is now inserted between the minus sign and the number at the beginning of an expression. Some problems with pass2 opcodes have also been corrected.
The Esperanto table has additional punctuation characters and a test harness. Thanks to Aaron Cannon.
Added missing symbols to the US English BRF display table. Thanks to Aaron Cannon.
Improvements to the Slovenian table and a new Slovenian eight dot computer table provided by Jožef Gregorc.
Fixes to the Norwegian tables thanks to Lars Bjørndal
- Fixes for less than / greater than.
- Add entries for URLs, domains and file names.
Added ne.utb, an alternative Nepali braille table. One of ne.utb or ne.ctb will be removed/merged in a future version. Keeping both for the time being so that users can test and give feedback on which is most correct. Thanks to Him Prasad Gautam, and Mesar Hameed
Much improved danish grade 1 and grade 2 6 and 8 dot braille, thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen and Mesar Hameed

Backwards incompatible changes

Delete the table chardefs-ueb.cti as these rules are now provided by en-ueb-chardefs.uti

Invisible changes

Refactoring in compileTranslationTable.c: separated more clearly the compilation from the table resolving, removed duplicate code, etc.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.3 (2013-06-21)

New features

New Braille tables

Korean grade 1 and grade 2 thanks to Joseph Lee
U.K. English 8 dot computer braille table thanks to David Reynolds
New Russian literary and computer braille tables thanks to Igor B. Poretsky. These replace the older Russian tables which are left for backwards compatibility.
New hyphenation dictionary for Russian thanks to Igor B. Poretsky.
Updated hyphenation tables for the Norwegian language (nynorsk and bokmål) thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
New hyphenation dictionary for Esperanto thanks to Aaron Cannon.
New Esperanto grade 1 table, using the x system for accented letters, thanks to Aaron Cannon.

runHarness.py:

Accept filename globs on the commandline to run specific harness files. In tests/harness, one can do make <filename> or make runall Removed from make check because these checks are checking the validity of our tables, rather than validity of the code.

Braille Table Improvements

da-dk-g2.ctb, mostly rewritten to use nocross and hyphenation table.
Most tables: removed the default collapse whitespace statements, if you need to compress whitespace, consider adding compress.ctb to the list of tables when processing.
Corrections to Unified English Braille Code (Grade 1 and 2), thanks to Joseph Lee
Corrections to apostrophes in the Computer Spanish 8 dots Braille table (Es-Es-G0.utb). Thanks to Juan C. Buno.
Corrections for double angle quotation marks and emphasis marks in the Norwegian Grade 0 Braille Table. Thanks to Knut Arne Bjørndal.
Fixes for a minor problem regarding the noletsign in Norwegian contracted braille. Thanks to Lars Bjørndal.
Corrections to the Italian table thanks to Igor B. Poretsky.
Corrections to the Hungarian grade 1 table thanks to Hammer Attila
Corrections to English, U.S. Grade 2 (ABAE) table. Thanks to Ken Perry for reporting the bug and John J. Boyer for fixing it.
Further reorganization of the tables to remove duplication. Move litdigit opcode common parts and include where needed.
Removed obsolete en-us-g1.utb, which has been replaced by en-us-g1.ctb.
Added dictionary harness tests for: en-ueb-g2.ctb, en-us-g2.ctb.
Corrections to Nemeth character definitions thanks to Neil Soiffer.
Corrections to the Esperanto table thanks to Aaron Cannon.

Bug Fixes

Cursor position calculation is now based on the same code that calculates inpos and outpos. This probably solves a number of bugs.
Fix nocross opcode processing.
Fix several buffer over/under runs in lou_translateString.c:hyphenate.
Fix the ‘=’ problem, i.e. fix inputPositions calculation for the case where the equals sign is used as the dots operand. Thanks to Bert Frees
Fix a bug when resizing a table. Previously not all references to this table were updated.

Backwards incompatible changes

The feature that allowed a mapping between language code and Braille table was removed as it contained a out-of-bounds access bug, was never documented and probably never used. Thanks to Peter Nilsson Lundblad and Jeremy Roman for analyzing this problem and providing a patch.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.2 (2012-12-18)

While initially planned as mainly a bug fix release this release contains some notable new features: There is a new tool to trace which rules have been used to perform a translation. Also along with other new tables the long awaited table for UEB is finally here.

New features

New tool to trace rule application

There is a new tool (lou_trace) which helps to trace which rules have been used to perform a Braille translation. This is helpful for writing Braille tables. See the documentation for more information.

New Braille tables

Inuktitut grade 1, thanks to Greg Kearney.
UEB grade 1 and 2, thanks to Joseph Lee. These tables replace the old UEB tables (UEBC-g1.utb and UEBC-g2.ctb).
Korean table thanks to Joseph Lee

Braille Table Improvements

da-dk-g2.ctb, fixes for transposed â, å, æ, ä, ø and ö, corrected/improved harness tests.
Corrections for en-GB-g2.ctb thanks to Paul Wood
Corrections to the Hungarian grade 1 table thanks to Hammer Attila

Bug Fixes

Update gnulib
Fix a bug in the correct opcode which causes sometimes random results when translating. Thanks to Bert Frees.
Fixes for compiler warnings.
Fix some Valgrind warnings about invalid reads

Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.1 (2012-9-24)

Braille Table Improvements

Fix encoding problem in italian table and added more character definitions. Thanks to Simone Dal Maso <simone.dalmaso@juvox.it>.
Rename it-it-g1.utb to it-it-comp6.utb and it-it-g1.utb2 to it-it-comp8.utb.

Bug fixes

Fix outputPos and inlen where an input character generates multiple output characters.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.0 (2012-9-10)

This release contains a tremendous amount of work many developers. Many long standing bugs have been fixed. The tables can finally be in UTF-8. A grand table cleanup removed duplication from the tables. There are now two extensive test frameworks for table writers. A number of new tables have been contributed on top of the usual assortment of table improvements. Thanks to all of this liblouis has already seen quite a bit of uptake in a number of places, notably the new DAISY pipeline will ship with this release of liblouis.

NOTE: If you have private tables you might want to migrate them to utf-8. To do this just use iconv as follows:

$ iconv -f latin-1 -t utf-8 <input >output

New features

New Braille tables

Estonian grade 0, thanks to Jürgen Dengo.
Portuguese 8 dot Computer braille, Thanks to Rui Fontes

UTF-8 support in tables

Braille tables can now contain UTF-8 in the opcode arguments.

Improvements to the python bindings

All constants defined in liblouis.h are now exposed in the bindings.

Add a doctest infrastructure

These tests are based on the Python doctest framework and are only run if there is a Python interpreter on the system

Add a test harness

This test infrastructure allows the user to do table tests in a simple and concise syntax. These tests are based on the Python nose testing framework and are only run if either Python 2.x or 3.x with the related nose python module is installed on the system. See the documentation for more information. Thanks to Mesar Hameed.

Add a test harness generator

A harness generator that uses simple text files with a little formatting to help to generate the json harness files. The purpose of this tool is to make it much easier and faster to add checks for a given table. You are expected to read the generated harness file and make necessary changes, the tool only helps you to get the tests into the harness format, not check their validity.

Support for Python 3 in the Python bindings

The Python bindings now work for both Python 2 and Python 3. Thanks to Michael Whapples.

Improved C-based test framework

Improved the test framework to be able to test translations involving Unicode.
Added numerous tests, e.g. for lowercase and Unicode, for the input position, for repeated, etc.

Improved the documentation

Document the test harness (json format, fields, flags).
Document the use of Valgrind to find memory leaks
Improve the documentation on the display opcode

Bug fixes

lou_allround and lou_translate now properly handle Unicode characters
Fix some issues reported by Valgrind
Fix inputPos for situation where context and multipass opcodes are involved
Fixed a number of bugs with the letter, uppercase and lowercase opcodes when dealing with Unicode
Fixed a couple of bugs with hyphenation (documentation, Python bindings and a number of buffer overruns in the C library). Thanks Milan Zamazal <pdm@brailcom.org> for reporting this.
Fix a bug in the $a. matcher in the multipass rules where only 32 chars were matched. It now matches 0xffff chars.
Fix a bug reported by James Teh related to pass1Only

Braille Table Improvements

all table files have consistent encoding, UTF-8.
The grand table cleanup: Reorganize the tables to remove duplication. Move common parts such as Latin letter, eight and six dot digit definitions to separate files which are then included. This should ease table maintenance. Thanks to Mesar Hameed.
Fixes to de-de-comp8.ctb thanks to Aliminator83@gmail.com
hu1.ctb renamed to hu-hu-g1.ctb
hu.ctb renamed to hu-hu-comp8.ctb
eo.ctb renamed to eo-g1.ctb
Fixes to eo-g1.ctb thanks to Aaron Cannon <cannona@fireantproductions.com>
hu-hu-g1.ctb: improvements and extensive test harness, with working back-translation, Thanks to Hammer Attila
Fixes to fr-bfu-comp6.utb and fr-bfu-comp8.utb thanks to Michel Such <michel.such@free.fr>
Reworked and extended Ethiopic braille table ethio-g1.ctb, superseeds gez*, thanks to Dr. Tamru E. Belay <g.braille@sympatico.ca>
Fixes to no-no-g3.ctb thanks to Lars Bjørndal <lars@lamasti.net>

Noteworthy changes in release 2.4.1 (2012-2-22)

New features

Czech hyphenation table thanks to Jan Hegr
Spanish grade 1 table provided by José Enrique Fernández del Campo and Juan Carlos Buño Suárez
New Tamil table thanks to Mesar Hameed

Braille Table Improvements

Improvements to the Portuguese grade1 braille tables
Updates and additions to Icelandic 8-dot braille table.
Improvements to the uncontracted Spanish computer braille table.
Improvements to the Norwegian braille table thanks to David Hole.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.4.0 (2012-01-31)

New features

New Generic Farsi Grade 1 table: A new table for Generic Farsi Grade 1 braille has been provided by Mesar Hameed.
Emacs mode for editing Braille tables thanks to Christian Egli

Braille Table Improvements

Improvements to the French comp6 and comp8 braille tables
Improvements to the Romanian braille table
Improvements to the Generic Arabic Grade 1 table
Improvements to the Czech tables thanks to Jan Halousek and to Jan Hegr

Noteworthy changes in release 2.3.0 (2011-05-09)

This release contains support for many more languages than before (Swedish, Kurdish, Ethiopic, Serbian, many Indian languages). The search path for tables is now a list of paths. Finally there is the usual assortment of bug fixes.

New features

Multiple table search path

The environment variable LOUIS_TABLEPATH can now contain a list of paths (separated by commas) where liblouis should look for tables. This allows the user to keep local tables.

New –quiet option for lou_checktable

lou_checktable writes to stderr even in the case of success. This can now be suppressed with the new option –quiet.

New Swedish table

A new table for Swedish braille has been provided by Samuel Thibault.

New table for Sorani (Kurdish)

A new table for Sorani (Kurdish) Braille has been donated by Peter Engström from Index Braille

New table for Ethiopic

A new table for Ethiopic Braille has been donated by Tamru E. Belay PH.D from Adaptive Technology Center for the Blind (ATCB)

New table for Serbian

A new table for Serbian Braille has been donated by Peter Engström from Index Braille

Improved the documentation

The deprecated opcodes have been moved to a separate section

Bug fixes

Fixed a long standing bug with an infinite loop in the table compiler

Braille Table Improvements

Improvements to the Chinese braille table
Improvements to the Flemish Braille Math Code tables
Improvements to the Dutch Braille tables
Improvements to the Spanish Braille tables.
Fixes for the uncontracted French 6 and 8 dot tables
Improved support for Italian 8 dot
Improvements to the Generic Arabic Grade 1 table

Noteworthy changes in release 2.2.0 (????-??-??)

New features

New tables

Support for many indian languages
Support for Icelandic 6- and 8-dot
Support for Catalan
Support for Dutch Braille (for Belgium and the Netherlands)
Support for Flemish Braille Math Code (a.k.a. Woluwe code)

New functions to make libraries relocatable

Two new functions, to set the search path for tables and files. They make the library relocatable. See the in the documentation for lou_setDataPath and lou_getDataPath.

Bug fixes

Improved support for Spanish
Improved Norwegian tables

Noteworthy changes in release 2.1.1 (2010-8-23)

Bug fixes

Fixed problems with the Danish grade 2 table
Fixed problems with the Marburg maths table for mathematics and the UK maths table for mathematics

Noteworthy changes in release 2.1.0 (2010-8-19)

New features

New tables

Added tables for Portuguese grade 1 and 2
Added unicode.dis for Unicode braille

Modified tables

Updated Danish tables

Implemented language to table mapping

New format of error messages

The error messages are now reported in a format similar to the one used in gcc.

New opcode

added undefined opcode

Python bindings

Allow the user to configure the maximum output length by specifying a number by which the input length is multiplied using the outlenMultiplier module variable. The default will handle the case where every input character is undefined in the translation table. Previously, this was hard-coded to 2, which was insufficient in some cases.
Add compbrlLeftCursor mode constant.
Add compileString function which wraps lou_compileString.
Corrections/clarifications to docstrings.
Add python binding for the lou_hyphenate function.
Added python wrapper for lou_backTranslateString and lou_backTranslate.

liblouisxslt as an example

Add liblouisxslt as an example to python/examples. This is basically an extension of libxslt that lets you invoke liblouis from an xslt stylesheet to do Braille translation on text nodes for example.

compbrlLeftCursor

Added a patch provided by Volker Bijewitz to implement compbrlLeftCursor.

Bug fixes

output cursorPos

Fix the output cursorPos when the compbrlAtCursor mode is enabled and the characters around the cursor translate to multiple braille cells, such as in the Chinese braille tables.

outpos when doing back translation

Include a patch by Timothy Lee to fix outpos when doing back translation (issue 11)

inputPos/outputPos for undefined characters

Fix the input/output position arrays for characters in the input which are undefined in the translation table.

table fixes

Fixed a bug with back translation of ‘*n’. (issue 13)
Fixes to the en-us-g2.ctb table

Python bindings

Remove unnecessary imports, allowing the bindings to run in Python 2.7. (issue 12)
lou_translate* writes output information in typeform, so allocate enough bytes for it. Fixes possible buffer overruns and resultant crashes.

Miscellaneous

Fixes to the man page generation to fix issues that were reported by the Debian packaging builder
Do not invoke help2man when cross-compiling
Documentation updates (issue 10)
Removing noletsign defaults
Many small fixes

Noteworthy changes in release 2.0.0 (2010-7-6)

New features

New functions

Adding lou_charSize function

Noteworthy changes in release 1.9.0 (2010-6-29)

New features

New functions

lou_dotsToChar and lou_charToDots function
Added lou_compileString for adding entries to tables at run-time.

Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.0 (2009-11-23)

This release contains a number of improvements notably the integration of gnulib, the automatic generation of man pages and the addition of tables for German grade 2.

New features

New tables

Tables German Grade 2
Swiss German
Swedish (1989 standard)
Swedish (1996 standard)

Modified tables

Updated Norwegian tables
Updated Chinese braille table

man pages

All tools accept the –version and –help options and are documented in man pages

Corpus based test cases for tables

You can now have corpus based tests for tables. See the README in tests/table_test_corpuses.

Bug fixes

config.h is no longer exported
Many small fixes

Noteworthy changes in release 1.7.0 (2009-08-21)

The main new feature of this release is the support for UK and Marburg math. Other changes include a new tool to check hyphenation and the usual improvement and addition of tables. Also The test suite has been enhanced and finally passes.

New features

New tables

Tables for UK and Marburg math
Hong Kong Cantonese
Hebrew
Hungarian
Slovene
Tibetan
Irish
Maltese

Modified tables

Updated Norwegian tables
Bug fixes in Russian tables
Updated French tables

lou_checkhyphens tool

New tool to check hyphenation

rpm spec file

Test cases for tables

The tables can now be tested with `make check’

New opcodes

noback and nofor opcode prefixes
grouping opcode
multipass subopcodes

Bug fixes

Fix for library name and Python bindings
Documentation fixes
Many small fixes

Noteworthy changes in release 1.6.2 (2009-05-01)

This release contains a new opcode for Malaysian Braille. See the documentation for a description of the new opcode.

New features

repword opcode

The repword opcode is needed for Malaysian Braille

Noteworthy changes in release 1.6.1 (2009-04-21)

This is mostly a bug fix release. It contains many bug fixes that were discovered in the course of developing UK Math tables.

Bug fixes

bug fixes for correct, context and multipass opcodes

bug fixes for largesign opcode

fixed bug with French back-translation

fixed the installation path for docs

documentation improvement

Noteworthy changes in release 1.6 (2009-03-04)

This release features support for Danish and Russian and updated tables for French and Norwegian. The search path for tables can now be specified using an environment variable. Finally there is the usual assortment of bug fixes.

New features

exactdots opcode

The exactdots opcode is intended for use in liblouisxml semantic-action files to specify exact dot patterns, as in mathematical codes.

LOUIS_TABLEPATH env variable

You can now specify where liblouis is to look for tables with the LOUIS_TABLEPATH environment variable.

New Tables for Danish and Russian

There is now support for Danish and Russian.

Bug fixes

Updated French and Norwegian tables

Use stdcall calling convention if building for Windows

Changes in behavior

None

Noteworthy changes in release 1.5 (2009-01-21)

This is a big release for liblouis. It’s the first time that it is done from the Google code page. A number of people have contributed, namely John Boyer (table debugger, bug fixes), Eitan Isaacson (Python bindings), James Teh (Python bindings, bug fixes), Christian Egli (documentation) and Michel Such (table for French grade 2).

New features

Python bindings

The liblouis library can now be used from Python. For more info consult the README file in the python directory.

Table debugger

liblouis now comes with a debugger that can help to find problems with translation tables.

French table for grade 2

There is now a translation table for French grade 2.

pass1Only mode bit

The new pass1Only mode bit will help developers of screen readers as the cursor will stay where it is expected to.

Bug fixes

Fix the inpos array values for the case where a rule has an output length which is larger than its input length.

fixed multi-word phrases

fixed bug in character display

fixed bug in findOpcodeName

lou_version now returns the correct liblouis version

Changes in behavior

None

Files

NEWS

Latest commit

History

NEWS

File metadata and controls

Noteworthy changes in release 3.11.0 (2019-09-02)

New features

Bug fixes

Braille table improvements

Other changes

Deprecation notice

Backwards incompatible changes

Invisible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

Renamed

Removed

Noteworthy changes in release 3.10.0 (2019-06-03)

New features

Bug fixes

Braille table improvements

Other changes

Deprecation notice

Backwards incompatible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

Renamed

Removed

Noteworthy changes in release 3.9.0 (2019-03-04)

New features

Bug fixes

Braille table improvements

Other changes

Deprecation notice

Backwards incompatible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

Renamed

Removed

Noteworthy changes in release 3.8.0 (2018-12-03)

New features

Bug fixes

Braille table improvements

Other changes

Deprecation notice

Backwards incompatible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

Renamed

Removed

Noteworthy changes in release 3.7.0 (2018-09-03)

New features

Bug fixes

Braille table improvements

Other changes

Deprecation notice

Backwards incompatible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

Renamed

Removed

Noteworthy changes in release 3.6.0 (2018-06-04)

New features

Bug fixes

Braille table improvements

Other changes

Deprecation notice

Backwards incompatible changes

New, renamed or removed tables

New

Renamed

Removed

Noteworthy changes in release 3.5.0 (2018-03-05)

New features

Bug fixes

Braille table improvements

Other changes

Improved documentation

Improved meta data information in tables