INTRODUCTION

Liblouisxml is an open-source library providing complete braille
transcription services for xml documents. It translates into
appropriate braille codes and formats according to its style sheet and
the specifications in the document. A command-line program, xml2brl
which uses this library is also included. The latest version of
liblouis is required.

The library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License
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.

DOCUMENTATION

For documentation, see liblouisxml.html or liblouisxml.txt. These are
in the docs directory. For an example of a configuration file, see
excmple_default.cfg and example_canonical.cfg . For examples of
semantics-action files, see example_dtbook3.sem and excmple_math.sem ,
also in the docs directory. 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 the
liblouis distribution.

INSTALLATION

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. liblouisxml inherits this
choice from liblouis.

After unpacking the distribution tarball for liblouisxml go to the
directory it creates. You may need to edit the file paths.c . This
controls where liblouisxml and liblouis will look for configuration
files, semantic-action files, and translation tables. Usually running
"configure" takes care of this.  After running "configure" run "make"
and "make install". You will need root privileges for the installation
step.

This will produce the liblouisxml library and the programs xml2brl and
the script msword2brl, rtf2brl and pdf2brl.

Note that that the library and programs will not work properly unless
you have first installed the latest version of liblouis. msword2brl
requires the installation of antiword. rtf2brl requires rtf2xml which
can be obtained from http://rtf2xml.sourceforge.net/. pdf2brl requires
pdf2text which is part of poppler (http://poppler.freedesktop.org/) or
also xpdf (http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html).

RELEASE NOTES 

xml2brl is a full transcription program. Again, type xml2brl -h to see
usage information. It will handle xml files from bookshare.org, docbook
files, xhtml files, files saved as xml by Microsoft Word and text files
"right out of the box." 

msword2brl takes a Microsoft Word file and produces a well-formatted 
braille file.