[liblouis-liblouisxml] Here are the New Releases.

  • From: "John J. Boyer" <johnjboyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:57:26 -0500

The latest versions of liblouis and libloouisxml are now available from 
http://www.jjb-software.com . The latest versions of the documentation 
are also available under the link "about the software." Here are the 
highlights.

Most of the warning messages produced by Windows compilers should now be 
gone. let me know about any that remain.

In liblouis, both of the problems reported by James Teh have been 
corrected. In addition the bug which caused a crash when the nocont 
opcode became active has been fixed. A bug which could cause a crash 
under rare circumstances has also been eliminated.

A new escape wequence, \e has been introduced to make it easier to
generate the ASCII escape character hex 1b, dec 27. This was done so
that the xml parser in liblouisxml can pass formatting instrucdtions
through the translator to the liblouisxml formatter. This new escape
character is used in nemeth.sem to direct the formatting of matrices and
to indicate the beginning and end of math expressions. It will be used
for other purposes in future releases.

The nemeth tables have been updated. Of course Mike Sivill will want to 
test them thoroughly. The tables for the Marburg mathematical code have 
been included, though they are not ready for use. those who are 
interested can look at them and help find the bugs. They will be 
operational in the next release. Note that since there are now two 
mathematical codes, there are also two editing tables, named 
respectively nemeth_edit.ctb and marburg_edit.ctb.

In liblouisxml a number of bugs have been fixed and some semantic-action 
tables updated. Note that there are now two mathematical semantic-action 
files, nemeth.sem and marburg.sem . The semanticFiles configuration 
setting now accepts an asterisk * as a member of a comma-separated file 
list. This causes the semantic-action file named for the root element of 
the document plus ".sem" to be read at this point. for example, this 
setting in canonical.cfg now reads "semanticFiles *,nemeth.sem".

Two major new features in liblouisxml are the capability to format the 
output file for reading in a browser and a table of contents generator.

The first is activated by the configuration seting "formatFor browser". 
It is useful if the input document contains internal links to various 
parts of itself. These links can then be followed. External links will 
also work, but the files will not be translated into braille unless they 
have been so translated previously. Text is formatted according to the 
style sheet. Mathematics and computer code are rendered in the braille 
codes specified in the configuration file. The output document works 
nicely in lynx and in Internet Explorer with Jaws. It does not work so 
well in Firefox, possibly because the Jaws scripts for Firefox are not 
as good as those for IE.

The table of contents generator is still in the alpha phrase. It is 
activated by the configuration setting "contents yes" or by the xml2brl 
command-line option -Ccontents=yes . It looks for any tags defined as 
heading1 through heading4 and prints them at the beginning of the file 
according to the contents style. the setting braillePages should be yes. 
Print page numbers will also be included if they are present. this 
feature still needs much work. Most of the problems are already known, 
so you need not report them.

Formerly liblouisxml could handle only text files and xml files that 
were well-formed in the xml sense. It can now also handle "old" html 
files. This is specified by the htmlDoc bit in the mode parameter to 
lbx_translateString and lbx_translteFile or by the -t h(t)ml option on 
the xml2brl command line.

There is a bug which affectt some files but not lbx_translateString. It 
is caused by overwriting of the specification for the output file and 
produces a segmentation or page fault. It can sometimes be avoided by 
changing configuration settings or xml2brl command options. If you 
encounter it, please send the file to the maintainer, 
john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If you have problems or questions please put them on the mailing list, 
so everybody can collaborate.

Thanks,
John


-- 
My websites:
http://www.godtouches.org
http://www.jjb-software.com
Location: Madison, WI, USA

For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com

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