These bindings allow you to use liblouis from within Python. The package is called "louis". See the documentation included in the module for usage instructions.

These bindings use ctypes to access the liblouis shared library. The liblouis shared library needs to be located in the library search path. In most cases, if liblouis has been installed in a standard location on your system, this is already the case and the bindings will work without any additional steps.

A standard pyproject.toml script is provided for installation tasks. To install this package for system wide use, after installing liblouis itself, switch to the python directory and run (as root):

sudo pip install .

Some tests are located in tests. Note that these require that you have compiled liblouis with support for 32-bit Unicode characters. See the top-level README for instructions on this option.

Remain in the python directory and run the tests with the following command. If successful, output will be brief, and note that some tests are designed to have "expected failures".

sudo python3 tests/test_louis.py

If you have a Python virtual environment created with the Python venv module, follow these instructions to make the louis module available in your virtual environment.

• If your Python is at version 3.12 or newer, the distutils module is deprecated. You can make it available via a PIP package with a command in your virtual environment like

pip3 install setuptools

• First, make yourself root or super-user with an su or sudo -s command.
• Then, activate your virtual environment.
• Now do as above, but without sudo, since you are already root.

python3 setup.py install

• You can now run the tests, as above, from within your virtual environemnt.