liblouis 2.6.0 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
2.6.0 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 and Orca. A companion project
liblouisutdml[2] deals with formatting of braille.

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

The next release will be published on December 1st so please keep
those improvements coming.

Changes in this release
=======================

This is the first release by the new maintainer team. A lot of work by
people from across the community contributed to this release. There
are massive additions and updates to the Braille tables (e.g.
Afrikaans, Hebrew, many Indian languages, Korean) and also changes to
the C API to enable call backs for error messages and warnings.

New features
~~~~~~~~~~~~

New Braille tables
------------------

Tables for Afrikaans, Cherokee, Hawaiian, Maori, Sotho and Tswana were
donated by Greg Kearney. Afrikaans, Cherokee, Maori and Hawaiian all
are grade 1 tables and with the exception of Cherokee were derived
from World Braille Usage 2013. The Cherokee was taken from the
specification published at www.cbtbc.org/cherokee/.

Logging callback
----------------

There is now a callback system in place to get error messages and
warnings. This can be used from programs that use liblouis to log
warnings for example.

Bug fixes
~~~~~~~~~

- fix back translation problems when word gets split in unusual places
  causing back translation of whole words for example K5 back
  translates to Knowledgeen, M>k back translates to Moreark, and M5
  back translates to Moren. This caused over 8400 extra back
  translation errors in en-us-g2 and 5000 in en-ueb-g2. Thanks to Ken
  Perry.
- Fixed bug to prevent removal of \xffff between largesign rules. This
  solves a Liblouisutdml bug where \xffff is used as a segment
  delimiter.
- Fixed a bug in back translation, when a letsign was encountered, the
  letsign was being applied beyond the element it applied to.
- Fix memory leaks in the default table resolver introduced in the
  previous release.
- Fixes to the build system by Simon Aittamaa

Braille table improvements
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Major improvements to Indian tables thanks to the Indian National
  Institute for Visually Handicapped, in particular Dipendra Manocha,
  Mesar Hameed, Dinesh Kaushall and Sreeja Parameswaran:
  - Corrected opcodes for letters, punctuation marks, digits, signs
    etc.
  - Updated braille codes according to prescribed braille codes for
    each Unicode character by the Braille Council of India for all
    Indian languages.
  - defined rules for dealing with Nukhta character in Hindi table
  - defined rule to insert dot-1 between consonant followed by full
    vowel character in all Indian Languages
  - defined rules for shifting of halant character before the
    consonant. This character is placed after the consonant in normal
    typing but need to be before the consonant in braille. This rule
    is applicable for all Indian languages.
  - defined rules for two conjunct characters "ksha and gya" used in
    all Indian Languages for which there are specific codes in
    Braille.
- New Hebrew table that is based on the new unified Hebrew Braille
  code standard that was put together on January 2014 after a
  conference with all of the specialists in this field in Israel. It
  includes improved representation of Hebrew letters, special letters
  that are called Nikud, and punctuation symbols. The old Braille
  standard is not relevant any more. Thanks to Adi Kushnir.
- UEB table fixes: Fix ity contraction, fixed the missing end word
  contraction ;n ;d sign 46. thanks to Ken Perry.
- Fix for Norwegian where letsign is affecting some extra characters
  thanks to Lars Bjørndal
- Much improved hyphenation for Norwegian thanks to Lars Bjørndal
- Korean Grade 2 now includes support for reading English text using
  grade 2.
- en-us-g1.ctb and en-ueb.g1.ctb are now able to display 8 dot Unicode
  braille.

Share and Enjoy!

-- Christian Egli, on behalf of the liblouis developers

Footnotes
=========

[1]  See https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/tree/master/tables
[2]  See http://code.google.com/p/liblouisutdml/ 

