This is a library intended to provide complete braille transcription services for xml documents. It translates into appropriate braille codes and formats according to its style sheet and the specifications in the document. A command-line program, xml2brl which uses this library is also included. The latest version of liblouis is required.

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Note that liblouisxml is considered stable and in maintenance mode. Development has now moved on to liblouisutdml. Future changes and features will be applied to liblouisutdml.

News

Noteworthy changes in release 2.4.0 (2011-05-11)

This release brings in the many bug fixes and feature enhancements that Bert Frees has done while working on the odt2braille Braille extension to OpenOffice.org Writer.

New features

xpath expression handling

Element specifiers for semantic actions can now be defined in terms of xpath expressions

New style attributes

• dontSplit + keepWithNext + orphanControl
• underlinex: New style similar to italicx and boldx
• heading5 ... heading10: Additional heading styles
• contents5 ... contents10: Additional table of contents styles
• centeredMargin: Prevent centered text from extending too near to the left and right edges.
• dontSplit: Protect an element from being split across multiple pages.
• keepWithNext: keep an element together with the first line of the next sibling.
• orphanControl: Control how many lines of an element must be printed at least at the bottom of a Braille page.

New table of content parameters

printPageNumbersInContents + braillePageNumbersInContents

Many layout improvements

• continuePages: Enable or disable prefixing of page numbers with a letter (a, b, c, etc.) on continued pages.
• pageSeparator: Enable or disable placing of a page separator line where a print page break occurs.
• pageSeparatorNumber: Enable or disable placing of page numbers with page separator lines.
• ignoreEmptyPages: Empty pages can be ignored, or they can be indicated with a combined print page number.
• printPageNumberRange: Show only the first print page number of a Braille page, or display the whole range of print pages contained in a Braille page.
• mergeUnnumberedPages: Ignore page breaks without a page number.
• pageNumberTopSeparateLine/pageNumberBottomSeparateLine: Provide a separate line for page numbers when they are placed at the top or bottom.
• printPageNumbersInContents/braillePageNumbersInContents: Enable or disable print and Braille page numbers in the table of contents.

Improvements

• braillePageNumberAt/printPageNumberAt: Print page numbers and Braille page numbers can now both be placed at the top or bottom together.
• Improved handling of linesBefore, linesAfter, newPageBefore, newPageAfter and pagenum.

Bug fixes

• Fixed table of content bugs
• Fixed braille page number should only be visible on odd pages when interpoint = yes
• Fixed failure when new print page starts on second last line of page
• Fixed endless loop when braillePages=yes

Noteworthy changes in release 2.1.0 (2009-11-23)

The main focus for this release has been the addition of user-defined styles with the associated documentation overhaul. Also there is a new tool rtf2brl and all the tools now have man pages.

New features

Styles

• User-defined styles
• styles can be nested in a document
• Persistent style settings
• roman page numbering

Semantic action

• "newentries no" semantic action
• "linespacing" semantic action

rtf2brl

There is a new tool to generate Braille from rtf.

man pages

All tools accept the --version and --help options and are documented in man pages. The tools are now licensed with GPL.

Bug fixes

• The version number is now displayed correctly.

older news