Re: The inners of Lout

[Oliver Bandel]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, DervishD wrote:

[...]
>     No problem then. Moreover, someone in the department suggested to
> build a 'justificator' for PostScript, no more, no less. The head of
> the deparment is aiming at TeX, and he has build a couple of macro
> packages that do the work for us (I don't use TeX anyway in my
> portion of the job), but really no ones likes TeX.
> 
> >The general question "Is it safe for me to move my enterprise
> >application from the existing system to Lout?" is really not a fair
> >one.  You have to try it and see.
> 
>     I'll try, but this is difficult. I must propose an alternative to
> TeX that must work at least as good as TeX is doing now. I trust Lout
> completely, but the TeX gurus at work says that Lout is not as
> flexible and powerful as TeX (I don't think so). The problem is that
> I'm not a Lout guru.

In typography TeX is superior (texprocessing character by character,
which reults in finegrained typesetting of words; Lout uses the
TeX-algorithms for linebreaking, not for typesetting the words
itself), but in many aspects lout does a somewhat more higher-level
work possible, which in TeX and even LaTeX needs additional
packages (but they are included in the distributions).

For example the diagram-facilities of Lout for setting
syntax-diagrams or graphics are part of the lout-system
(the packages of the lout-distribution) and they are
very good.

Setting diagrams seems to be easier in lout than in LaTeX.
(But ConTeXt seems to be better in this task than LaTeX, but
I can't tell you more details about ConTeXt, I only have seen
some example code, bt not worked with it).




> 
> >My main suggestion is that you should used the standard packages
> >even in your machine-generated Lout.
> 
>     This will be a weak point of Loiut in the decision. The TeX gurus
> thinks that Lout is not capable of making even the simplest layout
> without its packages. This is not true, of course, but makes me
> present Lout as a powerful language *without the need for the
> packages*.

*Both* systems - when used naked - are a horror for normal
people and a luck for bored programmers. ;-)

(BTW do you mean LaTeX, when saying TeX, or are
you using plain-TeX?)


Comparing Lout with it's standard packages to LaTeX with
it's standard packages, both systems are good and both
has advantages and disadvantages.

I think it's more the question of what your main task
is (micro-typography? macro-typography/layout?, ...)
and a lot of personnel taste...



> 
>     I know, it's stupid, but so is the enterprise where I work.
> Imagine, the key point for using TeX is that no bugs have been
> discovered in it in years,

Yes, TeX has not very much bugs. But recently the implementor
of NTS (New Typesetting System, a backward compatible OO-TeX,
implemented in (horror!) Java) has found problems in the
original TeX-sources and it seems to be a bug...

...Don E. Knuth will have a look at it... and maybe it's
really a bug. We have to wait some time for the answer of
DEK.


> and that the author offers a reward if a
> bug is discovered...

But the reward is not as high as it should/could be:
First it was said that the reward will be doubled
each time a new bug was found.
But this growing reward was stopped and the price
will not be doubled every time... but it's true that
you get a reward/price from DEK if you have located a bug.


> Really the only thing I must ensure is that any
> bug related to layout and that any .lout text rejected by Lout are
> the fault of the composer, not Lout. Otherwise I see myself learning
> TeX ;))))

Or maybe learning troff (or groff)?
Or better PostScript? ;)

Ciao,
   Oliver