FAQ
From lout
Lout FAQ/HOWTO
This Lout FAQ/HOWTO was originally written by Eric Marsden, and was reworked and updated for this Wiki site with the author's permission. This document contains information about the Lout text formatting system. It includes a collection of questions frequently asked on the Lout mailing list.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. What is Lout?
- 2.1. Is Lout Open Source software?
- 2.2. Why is Lout also known as Basser Lout?
- 2.3. What platforms does Lout run on?
- 2.4. Where can I get Lout?
- 2.5. How can I use the output generated by Lout?
- 2.6. So is Lout like a word processor?
- 2.7. Why would I use Lout instead of LaTeX or troff?
1. Introduction
This is a collection of questions frequently asked on the Lout mailing list. Please read through this document before posting a question to the Lout mailing list. This FAQ was originally written by Eric Marsden. The original copyright notice follows:
- This document is Copyright 1997-2001 by Eric Marsden. Feel free to copy or distribute this document in whole or in part for any purpose and on any medium you choose, provided you do not omit this notice. Feedback is welcome; please send remarks, suggestions and corrections to <emarsden@NOSPAM.mail.dotcom.fr> (Subject: containing "lout").
For this protected wiki, please contact the maintainers via the Lout mailing list.
2. What is Lout?
Lout is a high-level language for document formatting. It includes facilities for typesetting complex documents containing floating figures, tables, diagrams, rotated and scaled text or graphics, footnotes, running headers, footers, an index, table of contents and bibliography, cross-references, mathematical equations and statistical graphs. Lout's capabilities can be extended with definitions which are easier to write than similar markup languages.
Lout is multilingual, supporting (with hyphenation) Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Russia, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Some of these languages are available as separate packages because they need more than the 13 standard Adobe fonts. Further languages can be added easily.
2.1. Is Lout Open Source software?
Lout is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2. Documents generated by Lout is not subject to GNU GPL. However, if you were to use install and use additional fonts in your documents, please check and comply with their licensing terms.
2.2. Why is Lout sometimes known as Basser Lout?
Lout was designed and implemented by Jeffrey H. Kingston at the School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney 2006, Australia. The School of Information Technologies used to be known as the Basser Department of Computer Science, hence the use of the now deprecated name 'Basser Lout'. 'Lout' is the preferred name.
2.3. What platforms does Lout run on?
Lout is written in ANSI C. It runs best on a real operating system like Un*x, but has been ported to a number of other operating systems. Up-to-date binary distributions are available for Linux and Windows. Please see the download page for information.
2.4. Where can I get Lout?
The canonical distribution of Lout is in the form of source code, available from Jeff Kingston's primary ftp site or, Lout's SourceForge project page. See the download wiki page for the relevant links to source repositories and to collections of prebuilt binaries.
2.5. How can I use the output generated by Lout?
Lout produces PostScript, a page description language understood by most laser printers. PostScript can also be printed on pretty much any printer (and previewed on the screen) by using the Ghostscript interpreter, which is distributed under the GNU Public License. See the Postscript FAQ for more details. Ghostview is a popular PostScript viewer that uses Ghostscript as the back end.
Lout can also produce plain text output, though any graphics details will be lost. There is also an experimental PDF (Adobe's Portable Document Format) back end. The latter does not support all of Lout's features, however, and has been deprecated since version 3.25, though it is probably usable for simple documents.
The PostScript file generated by Lout can be distilled into a PDF document. Adobe sells the most common commercial distiller. Ghostscript is capable of distilling PostScript generated by Lout; both free and commercial versions are available.
2.6. So is Lout like a word processor?
Lout is not a word processor like WordPerfect or Microsoft Word. These programs are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get); the text displayed on your computer's screen is an approximation to what will appear on the printed page. Lout, in contrast, is a markup language. This means that if you want bold or italic text, you write (with your favorite text editor)
if you want @B{bold} or @I{italic} text,
Other symbols are used to identify headings, paragraphs, footnotes and so on. The Lout interpreter reads these commands and produces nicely formatted output. The comp.text FAQ contains a more complete discussion of the relative merits of markup and WYSIWYG; for starters you may wish to ask yourself how many different (and incompatible) .doc formats Microsoft has unleashed upon the unsuspecting users of successive releases of Microsoft Word.
2.7. Why use Lout instead of LaTeX or troff?
Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. For example, Lout uses Knuth's (the author of TeX, on which LaTeX is based) optimal line breaking algorithm, and has extended it to paragraph breaking across pages. For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax (see the "Simple Examples" section). Lout is much more "programmer friendly" than TeX's macros (and a fortiori than incomprehensible troff macros). See the "Advanced Examples" section.
Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.
The Lout distribution is very easy to compile and maintain, which certainly is not the case of many TeX distributions. The Lout distribution is much smaller (it fits onto a floppy disk) than LaTeX, and doesn't require storing tfm and pk font outlines (since Postscript fonts are used). Lout Postscript files are more compact than those produced from the process .tex -TeX-> .dvi -dvips-> .ps.
Lout is multi-lingual out of the box, and understands ISO-8859 latin-1 characters.
On the other hand, LaTeX is much more widely used than Lout (TeX has been around since the late 1970s, Lout only since 1991). It will be easier to find a local TeXpert than a Louter, and there are many more user-contributed packages for LaTeX than for Lout. Many academic journals request (or require) that papers be submitted in LaTeX. Lout uses more memory than TeX, up to 10MB to compile large documents.
Lout is more friendly to advanced users. LaTeX style sheets are written in a twisted, diabolical manner apparently designed to make all but trivial changes to a document's appearance difficult; its internals are packaged as a "black box" which ordinary mortals aren't meant to understand. Lout styles are much easier to design and modify according to your needs.
The Lout formatting language is conceptually cleaner and higher level than TeX (which was designed to run efficiently on computers from another era). For example, Lout has no built-in notion of a "page".
Last but not least, Lout comes with very comprehensive and comprehensible documentation. The user's guide contains all you need to know for using Lout effectively - something that is hard to find in the LaTeX world because LaTeX consists of so many different packages (which sometimes don't get along all that well).
