Maintenance or successors? (was Re: Buffer overflow in the StringQuotedWord() function)

[Mark Carroll]

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badly off-topic: If Basser Lout is no longer maintained then I suppose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