ANNOUNCEMENT

liblouis 3.36.0 has been released

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release
3.36.0. The release is available for download at:

https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/releases

Introduction
============

Liblouis is an open-source braille translator and back-translator. It
features support for computer, literary and math braille, supports
contracted and uncontracted translation for many, many languages [1]_.
It plays an important role in an open source accessibility stack and is
used by screenreaders such as NVDA, Orca and JAWS. A companion project
liblouisutdml [2]_ deals with formatting of braille.

Noteworthy changes in this release
==================================

This release brings various updates to braille tables, particularly for
Slovakian and Norwegian in line with the respective changes to their the
braille standards. There are new tables for Macedonian uncontracted
braille and the long awaited table for English Grade 3 is finally here.
On the technical side, there are modernized Python bindings and better
support for building liblouis for environments such as Android.

I'd like to thank everyone for helping to bring liblouis forward.

For a detailed list of all the changes refer to the list of closed
issues]].

New features
------------

-  There is a new table for Macedonian uncontracted braille thanks to
   Kristijan Lazarev.
-  There is a new table for `English Grade
   3 <http://www.grade3braille.com>`__ thanks to Bue Vester-Andersen.

Bug fixes
---------

-  Fix a bug with having to double escape certain characters in match
   patterns. Escaping now works as you'd expect thanks to Christian
   Egli.

Braille table improvements
--------------------------

-  Improvements to Hungarian forward and backward translation thanks to
   Attila Hammer.
-  Update the Slovakian 6-dot literary table to be in line with the
   latest Slovak braille standards thanks to Peter Vágner and other
   members of the
   [[https://www.skn.sk/en/the-braille-authority-of-slovakia][Braille
   Authority of Slovakia [3]_.

   -  Added emphasis indication for bold, italic and underline
   -  Fixed back translation issues
   -  Added additional symbols for foreign Latin alphabet characters

-  Norwegian Grade 2 has seen a major overhaul according to the
   adjustments made by the Norwegian Braille Authority thanks to Lars
   Bjørndal.
-  Improve the handling of Greek letters in Norwegian 8-dot braille
   thanks to Lars Bjørndal.

Other changes
-------------

-  Fix the linking of the fuzzers thanks to Samuel Thibault.
-  Use ``"config.h"`` instead of ``<config.h>`` for portability thanks
   to Patryk Miś. This change does not affect normal autotools builds,
   but improves portability for alternative build systems such as CMake,
   Bazel, or the Android NDK.
-  Modernize the Python bindings thanks to Leonard de Ruijter. The
   minimum Python version is now 3.10. The syntax has been updated, type
   hints have been added and the doc strings are modernized.

Deprecation notice
------------------

-  None

Backwards incompatible changes
------------------------------

-  None

Invisible changes
-----------------

-  None

New, renamed or removed tables
------------------------------

New
~~~

-  ``mk-g1.utb``
-  ``en-g3.ctb``

Renamed
~~~~~~~

-  None

Removed
~~~~~~~

-  None

Next release
============

The next release will be published on March 2 2026 so please keep up the
excellent work and keep those improvements coming.

Share and Enjoy!

– Christian Egli, on behalf of the liblouis developers

Footnotes
=========

.. [1]
   https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/tree/master/tables

.. [2]
   https://github.com/liblouis/liblouisutdml

.. [3]
   https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/milestone/46?closed=1