ANNOUNCEMENT

liblouis 3.12.0 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
3.12.0. 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.

Noteworthy changes in this release
==================================

This release contains major updates to the UEB, Afrikaans, Chinese,
Danish and Polish tables. Aside from that there have been many code
cleanups, such as the elimination of many global vars and bug fixes such
as an endless loop or a crash in ``lou_translate``.

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

New features
------------

None

Bug fixes
---------

-  Fix a memory leak when several tables are specified and some of them
   that can't be resolved. Thanks to André-Abush Clause.
-  Fix an endless loop with multipass rules where ``endReplace`` is
   smaller or equal to ``startMatch``. Thanks to Bert Frees and Bue
   Vester-Andersen.

Braille table improvements
--------------------------

-  Punctuation corrections in Ethiopic Braille thanks to Dr. Tamru E.
   Belay.
-  Fixes to the Norwegian 8dot braille table in regards to 4 Sami
   characters, capital and small letters S and Z with caron. Thanks to
   Oddvar Øyan and Lars Bjørndal.
-  Improvements to Afrikaans contracted braille thanks to Christo de
   Klerk

   -  Over 50 cases have been corrected where braille rules were not
      correctly applied in words, mainly in those cases where
      contractions depend on pronunciation; for example, ui or ie must
      not be contracted in requiem.
   -  Corrected contraction errors caused by start or end of input not
      properly taken into account.
   -  Words are no longer contracted into lower word contractions when
      they are adjacent to lower punctuation, for example: "hier.
   -  Words are now contracted into their lower contractions when they
      are adjacent to upper punctuation, for example: (hier.

-  New draft table for Dutch 8-dot computer braille thanks to Leonard de
   Ruijter.
-  Updates to the Chinese braille table (``zh-tw.ctb``) thanks to
   Bo-Cheng Jhan, Coscell Kao, 特種兵, 黃偉豪, and Victor Cai.
-  Fixes to Polish grade 1, thanks to Łukasz Golonka

   -  Removes some unneeded ``midnum`` symbols from the Polish Grade 1.
   -  Fixes some symbols which weren't defined according to the
      specification.
   -  Makes it possible to type dot from a braille keyboard.
   -  Adds Greek letters and some commonly used math operators to both
      the Grade 1 and the computer braille table.

-  Fix several conflicts in ``fr-bfu-comp68.cti`` with regards to the
   IPA Unicode range. These had been especially noticed when
   ``compbrlAtCursor`` mode flag was used. Thanks to André-Abush Clause.
-  Major Improvements to contraction use in UEB thanks to James Bowden.
-  Updates to the Danish Tables thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen:

   -  Added miscelaneous Unicode characters to 8 dots grade 1 and 2
      (accented letters, punctuation, arrows and some math signs). Most
      of these characters have not been defined in the Danish Braille
      standard. This implementation is purely experimental, and the
      characters may be changed later.
   -  Updated the 6 dots tables with more Unicode characters (no arrows
      or math signs).
   -  Corrected a bug in 8 dots grade 2, which resulted in the
      "var" contraction not always being properly applied.

Other changes
-------------

-  Make sure the log callback uses the same calling convention as all
   the other exported functions. Thanks to Leonard de Ruijter.
-  Fix a problem with Non-ASCII characters in file paths in the Python
   bindings, thanks to André-Abush Clause.
-  Eliminate some of the globals variables thanks to Bert Frees.
-  The display and the translation are now separated at least
   internally, thanks to Bert Frees. As a reminder, there are two phases
   to a braille conversion:

   translation
      liblouis uses the rules in the translation table to convert
      characters to dots
   display
      display the dots as characters. Usually liblouis uses the
      characters defined in display rules (in display tables) but as a
      fallback it uses mappings defined in the translation table, e.g.
      letter rules.

-  No longer install ``lou_compare``, a tool that is used to run
   regression tests for UEB. As it is only run during testing it will no
   longer be installed by default on a users machine.
-  Remove a hidden feature of ``lou_translate`` that would cause it to
   crash if passed an invalid file name. Thanks to Christian Egli.
-  Raise an error if a dot pattern can not be displayed instead of
   silently ignoring it thanks to Bert Frees.

Deprecation notice
------------------

None

Backwards incompatible changes
------------------------------

None

Invisible changes
-----------------

New, renamed or removed tables
------------------------------

New
~~~

-  nl-comp8.utb

Renamed
~~~~~~~

None

Removed
~~~~~~~

None

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

The next release will be published on March 2 2020 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/22?closed=1