LibLouis

Appendix H LibLouis

liblouis

liblouis.io

is an open-source library for low-level translation of phrases into braille, supporting many, many languages. We rely on Python bindings for this library to translate all of the literary text (non-math) to braille for a document, so this is an essential piece of the pipeline. Once installed, its use is transparent. This appendix contains some brief notes to help with installation, current as of 2023-06-09, and for Ubuntu Linux 22.04. Contributions of adjustments for other operating systems welcome.

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Download the liblouis-X.YY.0.tar.gz archive from the downloads page
²
liblouis.io/downloads
. Releases are tracked at the GitHub release page
³
github.com/liblouis/liblouis/releases
. The liblouisutdml package is not necessary.
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tar -xvf liblouis-X.YY.0.tar.gz into a scratch directory like /tmp.
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Switch to being root (sudo) and cd into the directory created by the extraction.
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In your terminal run
```
# ./configure --enable-ucs4
# make
# make install
```
The “ucs4” flag enables 32-bit Unicode support, which is necessary for running tests later.

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Read /tmp/liblouis-X.YY.0/python/README.md and perform two steps, still as root, from within the directory structure in /tmp: install the bindings into your Python distribution and run the Python tests.
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I do not do anything special to clean-up afterwards, and of course, my /tmp goes away on the next reboot. I also do not do anything special when installing the next version, I just follow the same procedure as a fresh install.
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