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 project liblouisxml.
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 such as from ViewPlus for example.
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.
- Read our publications & presentation slides
- Consult the documentation, including download and installation instructions
- Subscribe to our mailing list here or chat with us on irc (irc://irc.oftc.net/liblouis).
News
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
