[bug #58447] [me] valid input with specific parameters causes a fatal error

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #58447 (project groff):

                  Status:                    None => Need Info              

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Follow-up Comment #6:

Possibly related, or possibly not, there is different breakage when rendering
the same document with nroff--there's no infinite trap recursion, but the text
of the footnote is truncated and the document ends prematurely.

Same output on groff 1.22.4 and Git HEAD.


$ groff -Tascii -me ./EXPERIMENTS/exceed-stack-limit-49178.me | cat -s | tail
-n 20
           x

____________________
tensive footnote text.
Alternately,      this
filler text is filling
in  as  the  extensive
footnote text.  Alter-
nately,  this   filler
text  is filling in as
the extensive footnote
text.     Alternately,
this  filler  text  is
filling  in as the ex-
tensive footnote text.
Alternately,      this
filler text is filling
in  as  the  extensive
footnote text.  Alter-


My wild-ass guess is that at least the originally reported problem is due to a
missing bounds check when the `(f` macro sets up a trap for an overflow
footnote.  Probably, there should be a limit as to how far up the page the
footnote is allowed to retreat.  What that limit should be is another
question; the first text baseline (\n(tm) is probably an absolute limit, but
it might make sense to halt footnote retreat "earlier" (farther down the page)
than that, so that progress can be made rendering the body text on any given
page.

I've seen some prodigiously long footnotes in my time, but I've also read
books that were typeset a century ago or more.  I'm not sure what style
guidance still exists for management of overflowing footnotes; since the
Linotype era, which our friend at Heraclitean River characterized as ushering
an age of loss of craft and cheap labor in typesetting, footnotes have been
progressively eschewed by publishers.  As I've noted in earlier vituperations
against Russell Harper, there is no reason we can't recover from the nadir of
artful typography brought on in the late pre-digital era.  So I'm open to
suggestions regarding how we might parameterize the magnitude of footnote
overflow areas.

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