Re: Lout 3.29 on MacIntosh

[Jeff Kingston]

Dear Carl,

Ack and thanks.  I've taken the liberty of forwarding your
mail to the Lout mailing list, basically so that it will be
archived, since I haven't seen any OS X reports on the list.
The warning messages you would get on any architecture.  They
just arise from macro expansions where the parameters are
sometimes constants (these ones spring the warnings) and
sometimes not.

The Users Guide contains textures, and these don't
seem to be widely supported in PostScript software.
They are the most likely reason why the conversion
would not work.  You could try compiling again with
the -t option:

   -t   Ignore  texture-changing  options;  everything that
        would otherwise have been printed using  a  texture
        will be printed in solid colour.

although even that has been reported to not fix
the problem in all cases.

In my experience the syntax diagrams features work very
reliably, unless they are too wide for the available space
in which case they get messed up, although they are slow,
especially on deeply nested diagrams.  If you print the
PostScript directly to the printer it can also be very
slow in the printer and even exhaust printer memory,
but conversion to PDF should fix that.

Have you looked at Lout's @Filter feature?  It's described
in the user's guide.  It's a civilized alternative to
preprocessors.  Using it you would be able to write

    blah blah blah blah
    @IndentedDisplay @Grammar {
    <identifier> := <letter> { <letter> | <digit> }
    }
    blah blah blah blah

It will feed the right parameter of @Grammar through a program
called by system(), which you would have to write.  The program's
output would be "@SyntaxDiag { ... Lout syntax diagrams stuff ... }".
The preprocessor would have to parse the grammar rules and
traverse the parse tree and produce Lout syntax diagrams
syntax.  A fun project.

Jeff Kingston