ANNOUNCEMENT

liblouis 3.28.0 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
3.28.0. 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 manages to bring as many new features, table improvements
and bug fixes as we haven't seen in a long time. There are a number of
major bug fixes that Bert worked on that fix bugs and inconsistencies.
On the table side there is a new table for Filipino contracted braille,
James has tirelessly been working on UEB improvements and (as usual)
Attila worked on the Hungarian tables.

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]_.

New features
------------

-  ``lou_translate`` has a new option to specify the table to use with a
   query. See the updated documentation on how to make use of this new
   feature.

Bug fixes
---------

-  Fix a bug when matching context rules that begin with uppercase
   letters. Thanks to Anthony Tibbs for the very detailed bug
   report [4]_ and thanks to Bert for the actual fix.
-  Fix a memory corruption error in the code for the swap opcodes.
   Thanks to the OSS-fuzz project for reporting and to Christian Egli
   for fixing it.
-  Change how emphasis phrases are determined. Also allow non-whole
   words at the start and end of a phrase. This fixes a problem in the
   UEB handling. Thanks to Ken Perry from APH for reporting and to Bert
   Frees for fixing it.
-  Character definition and base rules are now always considered in the
   order in which they are defined in the table. In other words the
   topmost rule always wins. This fixes a number of problems and
   inconsistencies. Thanks to Bert Frees for the fix.

   -  Fix a problem with ``compbrlAtCursor`` and ``compbrlLeftCursor``
      that was reported by Daniel Mayr

-  When a table does not define any capital marks, rules are now case
   sensitive thanks to Bert Frees

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

-  Improvements to UEB

   -  fixes to many words starting with letters "BE-".
   -  Fix back translation of dots 26 - when standing alone; should be
      the word enough.
   -  Fix assignment for the right double arrow and added left, up, and
      down double arrows.
   -  Fix typos in a couple of rules.
   -  Fix words beginning "CONS-" and "DISHD-" when written uppercase,
      all above thanks to James Bowden.
   -  Ensure letter indicators are added to letters A-J following
      numbers in a capitalized passage, thanks to Anthony Tibbs.

-  Improvements to Hungarian (added more exceptions) thanks to Attila
   Hammer.
-  New table for Filipino contracted braille, thanks to Allan Mesoga and
   Dang Hoai Phúc.

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

-  The ``manywarnigs`` module from gnulib is no longer used. It caused
   massive slowdowns when compiling with gcc.
-  Add the name of the concerned table when logging warnings thanks to
   Bert Frees for the patch and to Attila Hammer for the PR.

Deprecation notice
------------------

-  None

Backwards incompatible changes
------------------------------

-  The order of how character definition and base rules are considered
   has changed. All included tables were adapted, but if you maintain
   your own tables you might want to look at the change [5]_ to see
   what you need to do.

Invisible changes
-----------------

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

New
~~~

-  fil-g2.ctb

Renamed
~~~~~~~

None

Removed
~~~~~~~

None

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

The next release will be published on March 4 2024 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/38?closed=1

.. [4]
   https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/issues/1461

.. [5]
   https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/pull/1481