INTRODUCTION

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 projects
liblouisxml and liblouisutdml.

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.

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.

The library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License
version 3 or later. See the file COPYING.LIB.

The command line tools, are licensed under the GNU General Public
License version 3.0 or later. See the file COPYING.

DOCUMENTATION

For documentation, see the liblouis documentation (either as info
file, html, txt or pdf[1]) 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 libraries liblouisxml and 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,
lou_checkhyphens, lou_ checktable, lou_debug and lou_translate. 

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

RELEASE NOTES 

The program lou_allround is for testing the library. It is completely
interactive. lou_checktable is for checking translation tables for
errors. lou_debug is for debugging translation tables. lou_translate
is for extensive testing of the translation and back-translation
capabilities. For more details see the liblouis documentation.


FOOTNOTES: 
[1]  You can create the pdf version of the liblouis documentation with `make pdf'.


