# Introduction

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Liblouis is an open-source braille translator and back-translator

named in honor of [Louis Braille][]. It features support for computer

and literary braille, supports contracted and uncontracted translation

for [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, [NVDA][] and [Orca][]. It

is also used in some commercial assistive technology applications for

example by [ViewPlus][].

Liblouis is based on the translation routines in the [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 [GNU Lesser GPL][] (see

the file COPYING.LIB).

The command line tools, are licensed under the [GNU GPL][] (see the

file COPYING).

# Documentation

For documentation, see the [liblouis documentation][] (either as info

file, html, txt or pdf) in the doc directory. For examples

of translation tables, see `en-us-g2.ctb`, `en-us-g1.ctb`,

`chardefs.cti`, and whatever other files they may include in the

tables directory. This directory contains tables for many languages.

The Nemeth files will only work with the sister library

[liblouisutdml][].

# Installation

After unpacking the distribution tarball 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 `make install`. You must

have root privileges for the installation step.

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.

# 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

[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.

[Louis Braille]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Braille

[many languages]: https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/tree/master/tables

[NVDA]: http://www.nvda-project.org/

[Orca]: http://live.gnome.org/Orca

[ViewPlus]: http://www.viewplus.com

[BRLTTY]: http://mielke.cc/brltty/

[GNU Lesser GPL]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html

[GNU GPL]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

[liblouisutdml]: http://www.liblouis.org/

[liblouis documentation]: http://www.liblouis.org/documentation/liblouis.html