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* Introduction

Liblouis is an open-source braille translator and back-translator
named in honor of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Braille][Louis Braille]]. It features support for computer and
literary braille, supports contracted and uncontracted translation for
[[https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/tree/master/tables][many languages]] and has support for hyphenation. New languages can
easily be added through tables that support a rule- or dictionary
based approach. Tools for testing and debugging tables are also
included. Liblouis also supports math braille (Nemeth and Marburg).

Liblouis has features to support screen-reading programs. This has led
to its use in two open-source screenreaders, [[http://www.nvda-project.org/][NVDA]] and [[http://live.gnome.org/Orca][Orca]]. It is also
used in some commercial assistive technology applications for example
by [[http://www.viewplus.com][ViewPlus]].

Liblouis is based on the translation routines in the [[http://mielke.cc/brltty/][BRLTTY]]
screenreader for Linux. It has, however, gone far beyond these
routines. In Linux and Mac OSX it is a shared library, and in Windows
it is a DLL.

Liblouis is free software licensed under the [[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html][GNU LGPLv2.1+]] (see the
file COPYING.LESSER).

The command line tools, are licensed under the [[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html][GNU GPLv3+]] (see the
file COPYING).

* Documentation

For documentation, see the [[http://www.liblouis.io/documentation/liblouis.html][liblouis documentation]]. If you build
liblouis from source you can get the documentation in various formats
(either as info file, html, txt or pdf) in the doc directory, see the
HACKING file for details.

For examples of translation tables, see =en-us-g2.ctb=,
=en-us-g1.ctb=, =chardefs.cti=, and other files in the tables
directory which contains tables for many languages.

* Installation

After unpacking the distribution tarball from [[https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/releases][releases]] go to the
directory it creates. You now have the choice to compile liblouis for
either 16- or 32-bit unicode. By default it is compiled for the
former. To get 32-bit Unicode run configure with =--enable-ucs4=.

After running =./configure= run =make= and then =sudo make install=.
As a final step you might have to run =sudo ldconfig=. For other ways
of installation, see the file HACKING.

This will produce the liblouis library and the programs =lou_allround=
(for testing the library), =lou_checkhyphens=, =lou_checktable= (for
checking translation tables), =lou_debug= (for debugging translation
tables), =lou_translate= (for extensive testing of forward and
backwards translation) and =lou_trace= (for tracing if individual
translations). For more details see the liblouis documentation.

If you wish to have man pages for the programs you might want to
install =help2man= before running configure.

If you want to run the test suite with =make check= you should install
=libyaml= as that will enable extensive tests on the tables. If you
want to skip those tests you can do so by running =configure
--without-yaml=.

* Participating

You can contribute to Liblouis in several different ways:

- If you have comments, questions, or want to use your knowledge to
  help others, come join the conversation on either the mailing list
  or on IRC. You can reach us at liblouis-liblouisxml@freelists.org or
  in channel #liblouis on irc:irc.libera.chat.
- To report a problem or request a feature, please file an issue.
- Of course, we welcome pull requests and patches.

Finally, if you want to see what we have for the future and learn more
about our release cycles, all this information is detailed on the [[https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/wiki/Release-schedule][wiki]]

* Release Notes

For notes on the newest and older releases see the file NEWS.

* History

Liblouis was begun in 2002 largely as a business decision by [[http://www.viewplus.com][ViewPlus]].
They believed that they could never have good braille except as part
of an open source effort and knew that John Boyer was dying to start
just such a project. So ViewPlus did start it on the agreement that
they would give a small monthly stipend to John Boyer that allowed him
to pay for sighted assistants. While ViewPlus has not contributed much
to the coding, it certainly has contributed and continues to
contribute to liblouis through that support of John Boyer.
