Re: Lout Backends

[Samuel Lacas]

Ludovic Courtès wrote 1.0K on Sun, Oct 28, 2001 at 09:54:13PM -0500:
# Hi,
# 
# I am currently trying to write an HTML backend for Lout. 
[snip]

Hi,

funny, I was exactly thinking of the same thing :) Having looked at
the existing backends, I found it quite hopeless. To quote a sentence
that was once said about lout and HTML, the latter is not made to put
things in arbitrary places on the "page", which renders the idea of a
lout backend quite hopeless to me. As you said, even the question of
detecting paragraphs at the level of a backend seems monstruously
cumbersome (or I understood the text backend totally wrong :), or
impossible.
To get back to the HTML stuff, my idea was to copy the approach of
HeVeA, a Latex-to-html translator (which happens to be written by a
friend of mine and gives me the occasion to study some CaML code). The
principle is simply to forget as much as possible the low-level
primitives (they are as complex in TeX as in Lout) and rather
recognize as many as possible common LaTeX commands. I suppose one
could do the same for lout, I haven't yet went far enough in my
research to see if it is a good solution or not...

sL