Re: On a programming manual for Lout

[Oliver Bandel]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2001, Jeff Kingston wrote:

[...]
> It's a curious state of affairs that people should be still discovering
> Lout and rating it as the next cool thing, when the language itself is
> already showing its age (16 years).
[...]

TeX and LaTeX are also not new programs, but they are really good
tools.

It's ok, writing LaTeX-Packages, but plain-TeX needs an intensive
study. This is too much effort for the most people.
Lout-Programming is relatively simple, even if there are some
things, that could be better, or at least better explained
in a manual. And there are a lot of things of TeX, where
the TeX-Gurus think, TeX is not good enough to praise it.


I think you have enough knowledge for designing a typesetting
program, and it seems to be so, that you would do it in an
other way  the next time (this is completely normal).
It's the same to the TeX-Gurus: The think TeX is a very
powerful tool, but they see the disadvantages/flaws of the system.
And they often say similar things like you: TeX has a lot
of disadvantages.

So, why not using the knowledge of both systems and creating
a new and better system?
There is NTS, the (one of the) TeX-Derivates. It's only
implemented experimental, but I'm not shure that this system
will survive.

It's time to break down the wall and get together the Lout'ers
and the TeXies.
And maybe there are other people with knowleedge of typesetting-
systems (troff/groff/...), which are not Louters and not TeXies
and may be interested in such a project?

I think, if the people with the Know How of creating typesetting-
systems and the knowledge of how to achhieve good typography
would document the "what we need/what we want", then there would
be a lot of people, who would say "wow, that's a cool project,
and I will implement it in my favourite language".

If the implementation of such a program would be a contest,
then a lot of good results would be possible, and maybe a lot
of programming languages would be used.
One can choose the best program as the new base-system, which
will be maintained for the future...

And you can be sure, that the time, the first implementation
is usable, will be short, because of the motivating factor
of the contest. There are enough programming-freaks out there,
with no idea of typography or who don't know the necessity
of new and powerful typesetting-systems.


Maybe the "who to design a typesetting-system"-papers should
be done as a contest too.

It's better to try it - even if this yields in no resonance -
than to try it not, because one is afraid about the possibility
that there maybe will be no resonance.

Ciao,
   Oliver

P.S.: Since some weeks I'm thinking about writing a program,
      which implelemnts a special plain-text-editing-language.
      Maybe a mixture of SQL and Perl-Pattern-matching (or so).
      If I have a abstract language for changing structured
      texts (texts with a markup-language-syntax), then I can
      use this as a meta-language of TeX or Lout.

      Maybe:
      wrap paragraph with \fbox where Paragraph.length > 10 lines;

      Or:
      Paragraph.map (@Box paint {lightgrey }) Pragraph.all where 
       Document.page > 10 AND Document.page < 12;

      Or:  Insert '\kern0.5em'  at Line.first where 
              between.start='hello'  between.stop = 'world'
              AND Paragraph.IsExplicitlyScaled
              AND Paragraph.Scale > 30 degrees;


      This are only ideas and should not critizized b with "oh
      this syntax sucks" or "it's not correct Lout/TeX/SQL-Syntax"...

      But why not using such editor-features, add Lout- and
      TeX-stuff and maybe some other interesting things which
      we may never heard of before?



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