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From: | Richard Cichelli |
Subject: | Re: Lout *not* dead! |
Date: | Mon, 12 Oct 2015 13:03:04 -0400 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.3.0 |
Hi Jeff and friends, Just to bring you up to date on our use of Lout:The reports produced with our newspaper advertising system are now composed using Lout. Never have I seen nicer looking typeset reports.
We use a custom SCS text substitution tool and companion macro processor to take what are Lout programs templates and then generate Lout instances.
We even generate/draw beautiful page dummies with Lout. The predecessor dummy drawing program was over 112,000 LOC in C. Using Lout and our pattern languages only 4,200 LOC were needed to provide equivalent functionality. This has been expanded to provide a near-realtime production page tracker and several other tools.
We introduced DTP tools for pagination into newspapers in 1987. We co-invented QuarkXTensions with Tim Gill (Quark's founder) and made it work with a very early version of QuarkXPress. We added support for InDesign a number of years ago and are now very actively working with Scribus and the Scribus community.
Lout has been a tremendous help in our development efforts. It makes a difference everyday to not just us but several thousand publication in 19 countries who publish in five languages. (14 of the 25 largest newspapers in the US see new output that is produced using Lout every day!)
We cannot adequately express our appreciation.If you would like more specifics to share with other Lout users, let me know.
Thanks, Richard. Richard J. Cichelli President/Member Software Consulting Services, LLC Suite 420 630 Municipal Dr. Nazareth PA 18064 Sales 800-568-8006 Voice 610-746-7700 Fax 610-746-7900 www.newspapersystems.com address@hidden On 10/11/2015 6:02 AM, Mark Carroll wrote:
Matěj Cepl <address@hidden> writes:On 11/10/15 03:44, Daren Scot Wilson wrote:Lout is certainly not dead for me.OK, it is not dead (like punk), it is just pinning for the fjords. I am glad I have excited so many (all?) users of it to make themselves known.I generally think of Lout as being in maintenance mode: no new features but I would hope that Jeff may still help to fix bugs. Personally I love how generally easy it is to figure out how to have Lout do what I want, partly because what I want tends to coincide with what it would do anyway. For instance, while I certainly appreciate TikZ, I've not yet had a Lout diagram that made me wish I were using LaTeX instead. I /do/ worry that Nonpareil is dead though. At the least, I hope that the basic "lessons learned" from all this is written up somewhere -- at least as a conceptual overview capturing the approach -- so that if there is someday some successor, it is as good as Lout or as Nonpareil would have been. -- Mark
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