AW: Is anybody still using lout?

[Henning von Bargen]

I'm a beginner with Lout. I know LaTeX and Lyx (wrote my math diploma using
it).

I have the following reporting scenario:
I want to generate relatively simple ASCII output (LaTex, XML, XHTML, or
Lout)
in an Oracle Database.
I want to give the end-user 2 abilities that seem to be impossible at once
with the tools i used before: 

(A) high quality output
(B) the option to change the output in a simple manner.

I was looking for a solution when I found Lout.
It seems that Lout is a 99% solution for (A) and quite usable
(say, 70%) for B.
LaTex also provides a 100% solution for (A),
but is only a 50% solution for (B) _on_Windows_.

But before I spent more time on researching Lout, I justed wanted to
see if it is still in use in real-life (the homepage is of 1998(?).
The LaTex-community is certainly much bigger(?).

Until now, we are using Oracle Reports.
This is a 95% solution for (A), but a 5% solution for (B) only.
I guesss the same is true for Crystal reports and other commercial
reporting tools.

This is why I'm desparately seeking for a better solution, be it 
commercial or freeware.

Now, to be more concrete on (A) and (B):

(A)
I want to be able to create
PostScript, PDF and TIFF Output and (if possible) RTF and HTML export
(with the natural restrictions of these formats)
including:

(i)
n-level tables where column headers can be magically repeated 
on the following pages
like this:
=================================
Continent | State    | City
_________________________________
Europe    | France   | Paris
          |          | Marseille
          | Italy    | Milano
          |          | Roma
          |          | Napoli
          | Germany  | Hamburg
          |          | Frankfurt
==========================<EOP>==
Continent | State    | City
_________________________________
Europe    | Germany  | München
          |          | Berlin
...

(ii) 
images from external files
and (if possible) figures like charts.

(iii)
Configurable, but out-of-the-box usable
page breaking mechanism.
I like the idea of LaTex to give penalty points
to a break.
This seems to be better than strict
"keep on one page".

(iv)
good justification (block, center, ...)
horizontal and (if possible) vertical.

(v) support for widow-control
Don't know the English word exactly,
german word are: "Schusterjungen" und "Hurenkinder".
This corresponds with (i) and (iii).

(vi) colours

(vii) support for displaying all European language characters.

(B)
(i) it must be editable under Win32.

(ii) The optimum solution would be if a user could a WYSIWY[G|M] editor
like LyX. I like LyX very much, but I need a reasonable solution
running on Win32. LyX needs an X server for that. 
Our customers wouldn't want us to install that
(and we wouldn't like it, either)
Why not a native Win32 GUI?

(iii) The user must be able to add or remove lines to a table.
   This is why editing the resulting PDF with Acrobat does not work, for
example.

(iv) The user must be able to change cell values in a table.

(v) The user must be able to add a few lines of text,
    like an introduction, a comment or resumee
    with basic formatting like bold, italics, header lines.

(iv) Since there seems to be no tools yet that satisfy (i) and (ii),
    there should at least be an editor with syntax-highlighting,
    and integration of the compiler in order to fix any compilation errors.
    TextPad, WinEdt or UltraEdit or EMacs can do this.

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von:  Dmitry G. Golub [SMTP:address@hidden
> Gesendet am:  Freitag, 12. Oktober 2001 10:17
> An:   Lout mailing list
> Betreff:      Re: Is anybody still using lout?
> 
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 02:42:01PM +0200, Henning von Bargen wrote:
> > Not much traffic in this list.
> > I wonder if anybody is still using lout?
> > Henning
> 
> I'm using Lout, LaTeX and learning SDF.  Silently, because of excellent
> documentation of Lout, easy structure of SDF and ready available books
> about LaTeX. And my poor knoledge of English.
> 
> D.
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