Re: Macintosh port of Lout (sort of)

[bbennett]

'Way back on 24 Nov 1995 address@hidden (Tom Gordon) wrote:
>
>Due to the problem with calling "sort", and a lack of time, I still
>haven't finished porting Lout to the Macintosh OS.
>
>But .... I have found another way to use Lout on the Mac.  Have you
>heard of MachTen?  It is a Unix implementation which runs as a Macintosh
>program, on top of Mac OS.
>
<snip>
>
>I was able to compile and install Lout with no significant changes to
>the makefile.  It seems to work just fine.
>
>A "real" Mac port of Lout would still be nice for those who do not
>want or need a Unix environment, or want to pay several hundred dollars
>for MachTen just to use Lout.

It compiles and runs in MacMiNT, the freeware unix workalike which runs as
an ordinary Mac app concurrently with others (as I gather MachTen does).
One can use the freestanding ghostscript port Mac GS Viewer to view the
PostScript files.

Because a genuinely free lunch is rare at the Mac diner, there are a few
hitches. Because MacMiNT itself is a bit of a memory hog, well over 8 MB of
physical RAM is evidently needed to run through the User Guide
(loutdoc/user). And lamentably loutdoc/expert/all can't be run through at
all -- Lout quits randomly toward the end of the first pass with the
message

        internal error: rename(ch[n].ldx, ch[n].ld) failed

MacMiNT's notorious blocking fork(), which can cause a pipe to overflow
even when unpacking a .shar file, may be the reason.

But -- for documents of modest size and complexity it seems just fine. Lout
is particularly handy on the Mac since a PostScript printer is so commonly
plugged in.

MacMinT stuff is at:
        <ftp://suniams1.statistik.tu-muenchen.de/incoming/MacMiNT/>
        <ftp://archive.cis.ohio-state.edu/pub/mac-unix/macmint/>
        <http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~mittonk/macmint/Home.html>

--Bruce Bennett
address@hidden