Maintenance or successors? (was Re: Buffer overflow in the StringQuotedWord() function)
Mark Carroll <[email protected]> Wed, 21 Oct 2020 04:23:24 +0100
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.type-setting.lout |
|---|---|
| Organization | none |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Thank you very much indeed for all the work already done on Lout, it's a real gem, both in software and documentation. Unfortunately, I have not used C (or C++) much since the nineties so I rather doubt that I am suited to attempt to safely address outstanding CVEs; my recent history is in fixing Java ones instead! Might somebody else be up for the catchup and ongoing maintenance work? Otherwise, I hope that this is not badly off-topic: If Basser Lout is no longer maintained then I suppose it raises the question of if anyone here has migrated to anything that does not pale in comparison, is there any agreeable successor? Maybe there is some other mailing list worth following about the wider state of document formatters? I've used Lout for my own documents but, in using things like XeTeX with TikZ in the day job and such, I've yet to find a match for Lout's sheer cleanliness, it is positively a pleasure to use; I guess the functional approach really works, a worthwhile research experiment indeed. At least after I have employed tips from others about getting it to recognize various kinds of fonts, Basser Lout is one of the few pieces of software I use where the surprises tend to be more pleasant than not. "I wonder if this would work? Yes, it does!" I wonder if I'll end up seeing how far I can get with Haskell's bindings to Cairo and if useful guidance would come from the text about Nonpareil which, admittedly, it's a long time since I looked at. Some combination of Lout's Expert's Guide and other "lessons learned" could be valuable inspiration; as you've previously observed, "Text handling is a maze where many have lost their way," so it would be great to at least continue to benefit from how Lout advances the field. -- Mark