Changes in this release

This is the biggest release of liblouis in years. 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.

New features

• Numerous features to support UEB properly. Thanks to Mike Gray.
• 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.
• UTF-8 support for lou_trace thanks to Christian Egli.
• The YAML tests now allow for an optional test description. See the documentation for more details.

Bug fixes

• Stop buffer overrun in lou_getProgramPath, and also free memory after usage. Thanks to Michael Curran.

Other changes

• 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

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• The json based harness test suite has been removed as its functionality has been superceded by the YAML tests.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.

Next release

This is the first in a series of alpha releases leading up to the 3.0 release which will hopefully happen before the summer holidays. There are still a number of known outstanding issues and possibly some that we haven't discovered yet. Please help to find bugs by testing this alpha release.