Re: sugestion for Lout - token stack

[Oliver Bandel]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2002, Jeff Kingston wrote:

> I think that Lout has certain limitations which have been there for a
> long time, and which at this late stage it would be better to leave
> alone.  I always cringe when I discover that the latest version of
> C, or FORTRAN, or Ada95, or whatever, has had features retrofitted to it.

What do you mean? My dictionary does not contain the word
"retrofit(ted)".

Do you think about using a different language for implementation
of the new system?


Maybe Ocaml? => http://www.ocaml.org


> 
> My long term solution to all these problems is to resign my job, which
> I will be doing in August (yes, I've handed in my resignation letter),
> and to spend three years at least producing an entirely new document
> formatting system.

Can you explain what you think about problems of Lout
(and possibly other formatting systems) and what you
want to do better?

I think a newer system should use features of Lout
as well as TeX, and possibly PostScript itself
(well, Lout is good here, e.g. @Scale and @Rotate).

A problem in Lout AND TeX is, to have sophisticated vertical AND
horizontal positioning over pagebreaks.

Some months ago in this mailing list a problem was mentioned.
It seems to be a hard one. But in TeX too.

So, maybe the new system will do it better?

A thing that could be done better (than) in Lout,
is the syntax of constructions like the sections
and subsections. The syntax IMHO seems to be too verbose.
TeX/LaTeX is there easier I think. (But Lout makes it much
easier to do do nested layout-constructs, like scaleing, rotating,
coloring and such stuff).


What are your ideas about it?
If you plan to invest three years for the new system,
it seems to be "the system that you should use...",
because it's superior to the others?
Will it include new ideas from other systems (what about
ConTeXt?)?


Ciao,
   Oliver