ANNOUNCEMENT

liblouis 3.17.0 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
3.17.0. 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 stands in the tradition of small incremental improvements
that make it another fine and solid release. Andrey Yakuboy put in a lot
of work to improve Russian literary and computer braille. He also
provided a new table for Belarusian uncontracted and computer braille.
Aside from that there are numerous improvements in Braille tables such
as French, Polish and Urdu. The documentation has been improved as has
the table meta marking the tables whether they are geared towards
forward or backwards translation. I'd like to thank everybody for
helping to bring liblouis forward.

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

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

-  The backtranslation of æ in French 6 dot braille has been fixed
   thanks to André-Abush Clause.
-  The definition of the vertical line symbol (|) in the Russian
   computer braille table was corrected thanks to Andrey Yakuboy.
-  Improvements to the Russian literary braille thanks to Andrey
   Yakuboy:

   -  Letters which are used in Old-Russian texts were added.
   -  Arrows, integrals and other symbols were added.
   -  the horizontal bar symbol (u+2015) was added and marked as a
      dash-symbol.
   -  Now accent marks are put before a letter according to the Russian
      braille rules.
   -  Many bugs with processing space-symbols were fixed.
   -  Improvements to processing dialogs and direct speech.
   -  Improvements to processing letters of different alphabets.

-  New tables for Belarusian uncontracted and computer braille thanks to
   Andrey Yakuboy.
-  Various fixes to Polish tables thanks to Łukasz Golonka:

   -  Add em dash to both computer and literary Polish tables
   -  Remove some definitions which made it impossible to back translate
      quoted strings from the Grade 1 table
   -  Fix back translation of capital M and add tests for back
      translation of all Latin capital letters for Grade 1 table

-  Update to Urdu thanks to Jake Kyle:

   -  Revised definitions of SUPERSCRIPT ALEF and ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH
      ISOLATED FORM.
   -  Changed contractions of ٹھ, ان, اِن, بے, بی, اَور and اور.
   -  Dots 3-3 used for repeated words instead of 6-6.

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

-  Fixed some valgrind issues thanks to André-Abush Clause.
-  Improve the documentation of *caps* opcodes thanks to Bue
   Vester-Andersen.
-  Add meta data to all tables indicating whether a table is geared
   towards forward or backwards translation or both. Again thanks to Bue
   Vester-Andersen.

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

New
~~~

-  bel.utb
-  bel-comp.utb

Renamed
~~~~~~~

None

Removed
~~~~~~~

None

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

The next release will be published on June 7 2021 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/27?closed=1