Re: On a programming manual for Lout

[Oliver Bandel]

Hi!

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Graham Douglas wrote:

[...]
> If you have Lout source code, please write some notes
> explaining how it works and -- any problems you had; 
> in particular, those aspects of Lout which initially confused 
> you and the "Eureka moment" you had when you finally 
> understood it (as I experienced with @Filter). 
> I will identify you, **if requested**, in a general
> list at the front of whatever I actually produce.
[...]

Ok, you had some Heureka-Moments with @Filter?

Can you please give it to the public?
After I don't had this @Filter-Break-Through-Moment,
I was discouraged in learning more about lout.
I think it's very powerful, to let play different
applications together.
It may be necessary to grab informations from a database
from within the Lout-text, instead of creating the
lout-text from the database.
This or other possibilities would be good.
Or maybe only a simple filter could help - if I get it working.

Hmhhh. I think a tutorial to lout would be good.
I see it now in learning programming with OCaml.
It's a very good documented language and it even
come with a tutorial text in the first five chapters of the
documentation.
But for beginners of both: FP and OCaml, this is
very hard, especially, when there is less time to learn
and - because of missing knowledge of the language -
no "production-like" project.

I think it's the same with Lout.
Maybe there is another "problem", that I use LaTeX
a lot and therefore it's not really necessary to start with
Lout immediately.
But Lout is very powerful. If I could learn it easier,
I would use it more.

And like the example in learning OCaml: I found a good
tutorial text, which is excellent in learning the language.
The details then can be learned from the excellent documentation
and in hard cases from newsgroups.

The same is it to Lout: Such a tutoruial-project would be
a very good thing.

Ok, that's the problem of *anything*, which is new to the
people: You need an *overview*, an "at a glance"; but it must
be detailed enough to create - even little - but fancy things.
(Things that motivate, ("I got it!").)
And Lout has a big potential. It's really a cool system. :-)

BTW: I think it would be good, to merge TeX and Lout - maybe
on a higher level. If there would be a psTeX, then one could
easyly combine advantages of both systems and produce documents
from different sources.
IMHO Lout is more powerful, TeX produces more-sophisticated/fancy
typography. I want both.

And I want the @filter and other nice features.
What's about a programming API to directly implement
some things on more system-near level?!

Two last questions: * Is it planned to (re)write Lout in other
                      languages? 
                    * Is there a Lout-port for the OS Plan9?

Ciao,
   Oliver