The runtime error which I mentioned earlier was beecause Java couldn't find the liblouisutdml bindings. They are in a subdirectory of the brailleblaster directory called bin/lib I understand that I have to set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH However, I want to set it to a path relative to the brailleblaster directory, not to an absolute path. Just setting it to bin/lib and running the brailleblaster jar from the brailleblaster directory doesn't work. This will go into a shell script called brailleblaster.sh which will run the app on Linux and the Mac and can be easily made into a .bat file for Windows. John -- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities