This is a preview of the new features and enhancements in the next releases of liblouis and liblouisxml. Most of these will not require you to change the way you use xml2brl or the liblouis and liblouisxml functions. The mode parameter for the liblouisxml functions other than lbx_init was introduced in the previous release. In this one, it has been given an additional function (See below). You may need to change your configuration files to accommodate certain enhancements. More mathematics codes than Nemeth are now supported. Consequently, the old math.sem file has been renamed to nemeth.sem . The html.sem file no longer contains an include statement for math.sem . Instead you must specify "semanticFiles nemeth.sem,html.sem" on the xml section of your configuration file. The configuration files supplied with this release already have the necessary changes. Nemeth is still the default math code. In future, enhancements like this will be anticipated when new features are introduced. This is part of software QA and will help to avoid surprises. liblouisxml has two important new features. First, It will now work with files in plain html, rather than being confined to xhtml and other flavors of xml. This feature works with the function lbx_translateFile. The function first tries the xml parser. If this fails, it tries the html parser. When the xml parser fails it produces a lot of error messages. You can avoid this by specifying htmlDoc as the mode parameter if you know that the file is in fact plain html. If you wish to tell liblouisxml not to reinitialize itself, use noInit | htmlDoc . If you use xml2brl you can specify that a document is html by using the -t option: h(t)ml . The other important new feature is that you can now tell liblouisxml to show links in a file in a way that enables you to use them. To do this you specify "formatFor browser" in the outputFormat section of the configuration file or use -CformatFor=browser on the command ine of xml2brl. The resulting file can be viewed in a browser such as IE, Firefox or lynx. The text, mathematics and computer code will be translated appropriately with the line length you specify. Links will be clickable and will take you to wherever they point. This feature grew out of the work on an algebra book that had links to other sections within each chapter. Future development may include a special braille text browser that uses this feature. Changes to liblouis have been minor. They consist of eliminating warning messages that were appearing in Microsoft compilers and defining a new escape sequence \e for the escape character \x001b . liblouisxml is using this character tr transmit formatting information from the xml interpreter through liblouis to the formatting functions. This same escape sequence is also defined in liblouisxml for use in the third column of semantic-action files. One use of the escape character followed by another character is to denote the beginning and end of mathematical expressions. This enables an editing table to do such things as remove a baseline indicator at the end of such an expression and put a number sign at the beginning if it begins with a digit. A new semantic action has been introduced. The "generic" semantic action causes text to be passed through to the translator and also inserts the characters in the third column appropriately. Most of the MathML tags, such as mn and mo could actually be replaced with generic. This action is not the same as "no". The latter causes any text to be passed to liblouis, but also inserts spaces. New features under consideration include a way for liblouis to detect Roman numerals so they can be handled properly. If you have features you would like to see, please psot a message on the list so they can be discussed. 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