Re: GUI for Lout

[Steven Baker]

> 
> Not controversial for me.
> 

That's good to know.  A number (quite a large number, actually) of the
TeX users are quite adament about hating LyX because it is ``impure''
because TeX is made to be typed by hand...  I thought many might say
the same thing about this.  Good to know it won't be unwelcome.

[snip]
> 
> The obstacle I see is the whole idea that you can do it in small chunks.
> What about line breaks, what about page breaks, what about cross
> references, what about running headers, ... ?  You might be able to
> handle what I call the "functional subset" in my design paper, that is,
> individual objects like
> 

That is what I was particularly worried about.  I think what I'll end
up doing is (if possible) have the generated pages such as Indexes,
References, TOCs, etc all automagically generated but not viewed as
part of the document, and the user can issue a ``view index'' command
to get the index which would then be generated from what exists of the
document so far.  Basically, the same way modern word processors do.
Both Word and WordPerfect have support for Headers, Footers, TOC,
Index, References, etc, but none of those are viewable on the screen
at all times, you have to go in a separate viewing mode.

Basically what I want is a word processor that is similar in power to
Word or WordPerfect, but similar in style to AppleWorks (because Apple
stuff is usually better and easier to use) or ClarisWorks for those of
you old folks. :)  but that saves as a Lout file.

I also will be very careful not to fall victim to the
generated-file-cannot-be-read-by-humans-overload-syndrome that we see
from most files that are automagically generated (see yacc and lex for
an example of this!), and Lout has a nice clean syntax that should
suit this well...  Basically, if I write a document in the word
processor and look at the source in a month, I want to have to
*wonder* if I used the word processor or not. :)

...

Another project, which will aid this one, that I will be working on in
parallel is hacking ispell to support Lout the way it supports TeX.
Although I haven't studied it yet, I assume making a hack for the Lout
format will be trivial since it's already been done for TeX... :)

AFAICT, TeX gets *way* more credit than it deserves...  I've used it
for homework before, and it's terrible.  It was made for writing books
and does not do smaller documents well.  It is also inconsistent, and
ugly...  Lout, on the other hand is elegant, unobtrusive, and works
well in both large and small documents---I want the editor to reflect
this.  LyX, IMHO is terrible...  I used LyX a couple of times which
just made me decide to learn TeX, which just made me decide to learn
Lout. :)

Anyways, enough babbling...

-Steven

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