Experiences with Lout

[Joerg Jung]

Hi,

in the following I would like to share my experiences with Lout from the
last six months. I'm writing my PhD thesis and started with LaTeX. I want
a rather 'stylish' thesis with nice headers, customized fonts and framed
and colored content. After I wasted hours searching the net, digging into
the source, adding several hacks, fighting with version incompatibilities 
-- I was still not able to achieve my design. Two simple examples, I
failed to achieve: opening chapters on the left side always (without
using the Memoir or Koma class) and use the same header 'style' in
Index and Bibliography, as with the rest of the document. To be
honest: I think LaTeX is a mess and a large Hack: the Memoir class here 
on my installation has 12750 lines... 

I'm fan of suckless software (e.g. using dwm/dmenu on a daily basis) and
I like the KISS principle, so I gave up on LaTeX and started looking for
alternatives and stumbled over Lout. I was surprised about the simplicity,
the speed and concepts. I was able to implement my whole thesis design
with fancy colors, frames, custom headings, ... in less than 16h (thanks
to the awesome user guide). On top, I finally got rid of Gnuplot all the
other crappy and bloated software for graphics and diagrams (hey, Gnuplot
still can not handle pie graphs... ).

To summarize: I'm convinced, Lout is great and saved me several hours of 
time. Thank you very much for writing this amazing piece of software!

Nevertheless now, to the drawbacks :)
While writing the thesis with Lout 3.39 (on OpenBSD), I stumbled over
several things, I would like to share here, please see below. Maybe you
can comment on some of these.

Thanks,
Regards,
Joerg

Minor Issues:
- @DP and the Option @DisplayGap are really 'overloaded' and used in too many 
  places. @DP should especially not used be between captions and 
  Figures/Table/Floaters. I think this was already mentioned somewhere in the
  mailing lists archive.
- When setting @ChapterStartPages { Even } and using the colophon, the
  colophon seems to be broken.
- @Place does not work from heading definitions in book template 
  (not yet defined/wrong context): Workaround: copy&paste own @Place into 
  included 'mydefs'.
- @Place + Landscape does not do what (I) expected (things are kept instead
  of rotated). I guess this is because, @Place is a Lout primitive
  operating on a lower (Postscript) level? This should at least be
  documented or mentioned somewhere.
- Defintion/Claim/Example/Proposition TitleFormat seems not to be used (with 
  book).
- Graph dashlength option(s) seem to be ignored (nothing visible happens).
- Diag link pathwidth set to thick + shadowbox + paint will result in links
  crossing inside into the boxes. Suggested fix: move the Links 'below' the
  boxes or do really end on the box border.
- @Python misses """ comments """, a short look into the code suggests, that 
  this is probably simple to fix. 
- Overheads: @Lectures @RunningTitle seems to be ignored 
- Overheads: with @Lectures the default @OverheadNumInDisplays { No } seems
  not to be applied.  

Sane Defaults:
- Abbreviations Chapter should really be part of Introduction (resulting in
  Roman Numbers instead of Arabic with the default settings).
- Captions in Figure/Table/Floater are not left justify-able as centered with 
  |0.5rt| by default. Workaround: @FigureCaptionFormat { @HExpand ...
- Overheads: Content/References title should not be centered by default,
  this makes it impossible to have a Left-Aligned Layout. Workaround:
  ContentWord { @HExpand Outline })
- Overheads: I think A4 portrait as default is not very useful. Something
  like B5 or letter combined with landscape is way better for beamer
  presentations.

Documentation:
- User Guide: orragged vs outdent example -- no visible difference in the 
  example?
- User Guide: @Overheads, @RunningTitle option as showed in Examples is useless,
  as ignored anyways.

Others/Feature (Requests):
- List of Figures, List of Tables, List of Floaters: an InContents { no }
  option is missing.
- With @ChapterStartPages { Even } it would be nice to override this option,
  especially for Preface to avoid empty pages. Workaround: I moved content from
  preface to @AfterTitlePage.
- There is no VERTICAL RULE, why??? I implemented my own based on some list
  archive suggestions:
  import @BasicSetup
  def @TVLine { @TGray { "0 0 moveto 0 ysize lineto stroke" @Graphic {} } }
- No abbreviation macros :( I ended up in implementing my own poor man macro:
  import @BasicSetup
  def @TAc right a { a @CrossLink { @S a } }
  And later using it like this: @TAc AAD in the Text, with a List in the
  Appendix:
  @VeryWideTaggedList
  @TagItem { @S AAD @PageMark AAD } { Average Absolute Deviation }
  @EndList
- No (auto) @Sym carriagereturn in listings on line breaks. Workaround:
  manually possible with Lout code in comments of listings.
- Shell/logfile and plain listing style is missing. Workaround: I re-used 
  Haskell.
- Colors: Specification in RGB Hex ala HTML/CSS would be nice. Workaround: 
  pre-calc or { bc -l } @Pipe :)
- @*NumberedDisplay number format: left side numbers are not possible :(
- Would be nice to have a Bibtex to Lout converter. I was to lazy to write
  one, but I guess with some Perl/String/Regex foo this is done in a short
  time and may motivate other users to switch to Lout :)
- I personally think the Plain and PDF export is useless and can be dropped.
  Both work only very limited and there are tools available to convert from PS
  to PDF to TXT and back.
-> For me ps2pdf works fine, once I figured out that
   I need to set some options correctly:
   ps2pdf -sFONTPATH=fonts/ -sPAPERSIZE=isob5 thesis.ps
-> IsoB5 vs Louts JisB5 -> Workaround: use customized 'other' page size in Lout.
- Diag Links really miss a color option. Workaround: colorize manually.
- @Graph definitely misses an option to set fonts (workaround is set whole
  graph). Furthermore, why no 'copy and local include template' for inheritance
  of default options similar to book, tbl and diag, etc.?  
- @Graph axes width is not configurable. Would be nice to have an axis
  line width option (for bigger axis than data lines). 
- A CrossLink to the line numbers of @CP would be nice to have, to be able to
  reference listing lines in text.