[erlang-questions] Erlang documentation -- a modest proposal

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

The version of Lout I have is 3.40 (June 2013).
The mailing list (http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/lout-users/)
is still active, although traffic is low.
Jeff Kingston is still around but seems to be focussing on
timetabling problems these days.

I have yet to meet a C program that clang does not complain
about (until I've bashed on it until clang shuts up, but then
the next release of clang complains about something else).
Considering that when Lout was first released, lint spewed
thousands of warnings (leading me to find some actual and
potentially serious bugs), it is surprising how little kvetching
clang does.  (Most of it about signed shifts, which I've been
using in C since 1979 and can't really manage without.)

Lout was originally written to generate PostScript.  It now has
a PDF back-end as well.  Some things aren't yet supported, but
there's always ps2pdf.  Apple's Preview sometimes has a hissy
fit over Lout's PostScript -- without actually saying why -- but
Ghostscript is perfectly happy with it, so I'm not sure which
program needs fixing.  (Given the problems I've had with
Apple's Mail I'd guess it's Preview.)

Just to make sure it still works I reinstalled it, and I must
say that building Lout, installing it, and regenerating the
documentation went very smoothly, in *marked* contrast to
Asciidoc or any version of Markdown I've ever tried.