Formatting chapters in Lout books

[Henrik Martensson]

Hi,

I am new to Lout and have run into a couple of problems that I need a bit of
help solving. I am not hand coding my Lout documents, instead I am using XML
to write the source documents, then I use a Perl script to convert the XML
source to Lout.

What I am doing is mostly a hobby project, though it gives me experience
that is valuable in my work. I am a member of an Amateur Press Association
(APA) that publishes a roleplaying fanzine. On and off I've been working on
an XML DTD for roleplaying game books and APAs, and I have been
experimenting with using Lout as a formatter.

So far (a couple of weeks), this has worked very well, but I do have some
problems:

* I need to format different chapters in a book differently. In
  particular, I need a single column format for some chapters,
  and a two column format for other chapters in the same book.
  (This is a standard format for the stuff I am doing. The single
   column format, with sidebars, is the main chapter format. The
  two-column format is for chapters that are lists, for example
  equpment lists, spell lists, and character lists.)

  Is it possible to set this up in a reasonably simple way? If so, how?

* Single column chapters in the format I want to emulate have sidebar text.
  Lout margin notes aren't quite what I need to do this. Rather, I need
  to set up a sidebar column with its own, separate text flow.

  Ideally, I would like to be able to tie the start of a particular sidebar
  section to a section in the main text flow to ensure that the sidebar
section
  begins either on the same page, or as close to it as possible without
  colliding with other sidebar sections.

  Is any of this possible?

* I really need to set up a recursive system for chapters and
  sections. For example, I have APA articles that I sometimes have
  to print as standalone documents, sometimes as parts of an
  APA submission and sometimes as part of an entire APA
  collection. This means that using the current Lout book and document
  packages, the same heading in an article may end up at different
  Lout @Chapter/@Section levels in different situations. This makes
  my filters unnecessarily complex.

  Also, Lout books are missing a section level compared to the standard
  format I must handle. If I could use recursive section levels, I could
  take care of both those problems.

  I read somewhere that there is a document package with recursive section
  levels, but that it is not part of the standard Lout distribution.

  Is such a package available?


Kind regards,

Henrik Mårtensson

---
Henrik Martensson
GNOSIS-Gruppen
Technical Documentation Services
URL: http://www.gnosisgruppen.com/