Liblouisutdml is an open-source library providing complete braille
transcription services for xml, html and text documents. It translates
into appropriate braille codes and formats according to its style
sheet and the specifications in the document. A command-line program,
file2brl which uses this library is also included. The latest
version of liblouis is required. Java bindings are built in to the
library.
The library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3 or later. See the file COPYING.LIB.
The command line tools, are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.0 or later. See the file COPYING.
For documentation, see liblouisutdml.html or liblouisutdml.txt.
These are in the docs directory. For an example of a configuration
file, see liblouisutdml.ini and preferences.cfg. For examples of
semantics-action files, see dtbook.sem and nemeth.sem. These files
are in the lbu_files subdirectory. For examples of translation
tables, see en-us-g2.ctb, en-us-g1.ctb, chardefs.cti,
nemeth.ctb and whatever other files they may include. These are all
in the tables directory of
liblouis.
First obtain the latest version of liblouis and compile it. Before compiling, you should chose between 16- and 32-bit Unicode, as described in the README file and the documentation. liblouisutdml inherits this choice from liblouis.
After unpacking the distribution tarball for liblouisutdml go to the
directory it creates. After running configure run make and make install. You will need root privileges for the installation step.
This will produce the liblouisutdml library and the program
file2brl. To compile the Java bindings go to the java subdirectory
and run ant.
Note that that the library and programs will not work properly unless you have first installed the latest version of liblouis.
There are docker images for liblouisutdml and liblouis. So to run
liblouisutdml from docker simply type the following command which will bring you into a shell where you can invoke file2brl:
$ docker run -it liblouis/liblouisutdml /bin/bash
root@74a8b1ad5e03:/usr/src/liblouisutdml# file2brl --help
Usage: file2brl [OPTION] [inputFile] [outputFile]
Translate an xml or a text file into an embosser-ready braille file.
This includes translation into grade two, if desired, mathematical
codes, etc. It also includes formatting according to a built-in
style sheet which can be modified by the user.
If inputFile is not specified or '-' input is taken from stdin. If outputFile
is not specified the output is sent to stdout.
-h, --help display this help and exit
-v, --version display version information and exit
-f, --config-file name a configuration file that specifies
how to do the translation
-b, --backward backward translation
-r, --reformat reformat a braille file
-T, --text Treat as text even if xml
-t, --html html document, not xhtml
-p, --poorly-formatted translate a poorly formatted file
-P, --paragraph-line treat each block of text ending in a newline
as a paragraph. If there are two newline characters
a blank line will be inserted before the next paragraph
-C, --config-setting specify particular configuration settings
They override any settings that are specified in a
config file
-w --writeable-path path for temp files and log file
-l, --log-file write errors to file2brl.log instead of stderr
Report bugs to <liblouis-liblouisxml@freelists.org>.
root@74a8b1ad5e03:/usr/src/liblouisutdml# You can use a Docker image to cross-compile liblouisutdml using mingw.
docker build -f Dockerfile.mingw .