Re: reports of Lout's death somewhat exaggerated

[Matěj Cepl]

On 2015-10-11, 20:23 GMT, Jeff Kingston wrote:
> Funny, I sent this email to the list yesterday but I
> don't see it today.  Anyway here it is again.
>
> Just to give you my view of the current state of Lout.

Hi, Jeff,

this is a way of apology for my too harsh words about the state 
of Lout. 

On the one hand I have to acknowledge that lout is one of the 
most stable packages we have in Fedora. For years, it just 
builds and builds, without anybody noticing, without bugs, or 
need of any touch of maintainers (of which I am one, but it is 
really a lazy job to do; i.e., I do nothing). And yes, from 
a programmer’s point of view it is obvious how it is possible.  
Lout is “just” convertor from one plain text to another text 
(PostScript is text) and it religiously avoids doing anything 
else. A result is that it has absolutely no build requirements 
and so no external library can force the rebuild because of 
changing API. This power is unfortunately a root of the biggest 
weakness: lout knows nothing about fonts (all that fiddling with 
fonts via external tools should be done IMHO by fontconfig, 
freetype and its friends), and (especially painful to me) it 
knows nothing about the world behind the ISO-8859-1 bubble 
(which is probably more limitation of PostScript; is there such 
a thing as Unicode in PostScript?).  Heck, even the more 
conservative TeX couldn’t resist the calling of times and (as 
XeTeX) it now supports both! And yes, the fact that XeTeX 
produces PDF seems to signify that the deficiency lies in 
PostScript.

And one more thing I have to acknowledge with a gratitude to 
lout (and its author): it made me aware of “Pride and Prejudice” 
and thus opened to me whole world of the romantic English novel 
(surprisingly I have still resisted to Middlemarch).

Thank you,

Matěj

-- 
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How fleeting are all human passions compared to the massive 
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