Re: Lout typesetting questions

On Sun, Nov 09, 2025 at 12:22:18 +0100, Basile Starynkevitch wrote:

> 1. Is GNU lout still some active open source project?

There is no active development of new features.  The current code base
works for the use cases it works for - which is good enough for people
with those use cases, I guess.


> 2. Does anyone have a public document (or HTML5 public page, or some
> public email on some public and still accessible in 2025 archived
> mailing list) describing the organization of the C files (the file
> names z[0-9]*.c are not very user or developer friendly).

Each file literally has that in its first line.  Trying to change the
file names now is probably just churn without much benefits.


> 3. Is Lout multi-threaded? (I believe it is not)

No.


> 3. Did anyone tried to use the Boehm garbage collector in Lout?

What for?


> 4. Did anyone tried to extend Lout with some plugin machinery (like
> recent GCC have)?

What for?


> Is there any philosophical objection if I try to add one?

Given that it's under GPL, no-one can really stop you :)


> 5. Did anyone experimented some Lout extensions adding a
> [turing-complete] scripting language inside it (Like LuaLaTeX has)?
> I dream of a Lout extended with GNU guile (perhaps might work on it
> once I understood Lout internal organization)

Again, what for?

If any useful new development is to happen for Lout, it's Unicode
support and TTF/OTF support that are, IMHO, a priority.


-uwe