two questions from Hadmut

[Jeff Kingston]

For some reason I can't get mail directly to Hadmut.  Since his
questions might be of general interest anyway I'm answering via
address@hidden  First question: can symbols be defined that
will produce ISO-LATIN-1 characters as two-character ASCII sequences:

(1) The only way to get it down to two characters is for both characters
    to be punctuation characters:

        def "'0" { ... }

    for example (0-9 are punctuation characters, as are all the other
    usual ones).  Unfortunately this is not mnemonic, but Lout is not
    able to separate one letter from another, as you found.

    Alternatively you could write a tiny preprocessor, using sed for
    example to insert the braces.

Second question: can Lout's treatment of white space be made to be like
TeX's? (this is a candidate FAQ)

(2) I still maintain that Lout's interpretation of white space has
    advantages, for example in distinguishing Mr. from the end of a
    sentence.  Many people are using it without problems, and it's the
    same as troff, which many thousands of people are using.  In any
    case it can't be changed as things stand, because there would be
    no way to get two spaces at the end of a sentence then.

Jeff.