Lout Version 3 sneak preview update

[Jeff Kingston]

I am now releasing Version 3 of Lout publicly as Version 3.01.
For your information, here is the news blurb that I will
shortly post to the news groups.  It is the same as "sneak4"
except for a small change to the format of .li files which
might go some way towards fixing problems reading databases
in locales that change the collating sequence of characters.


         THE LOUT DOCUMENT FORMATTING SYSTEM, VERSION 3.01

Version 3.01 of the Lout document formatting system is now available
(free of charge).  The system reads a high-level description of a
document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript file which
can be printed on many laser printers and graphic display devices.

Lout offers an unprecedented range of advanced features, including
optimal paragraph breaking, automatic hyphenation, PostScript EPS file
inclusion and generation, equation formatting, tables, diagrams,
rotation and scaling, sorted indexes, bibliographic databases, running
headers and odd-even pages, automatic cross referencing, and much more,
all ready to go.  Furthermore, Lout is easily extended with definitions
which are very much easier to write than troff of TeX macros because
Lout is a high-level language, the outcome of an eight-year research
project that went back to the beginning.

New features just introduced in Version 3.01 include plain text output,
support for multilingual documents including hyphenation, packages for
overhead transparencies, graphs, and C/C++ programs, many enhancements
suggested by users, and an all-inclusive User's Guide.

Lout is written in C and is highly portable to Unix systems.  It is
distributed under the GNU public license as a gzipped tar file called
"lout.3.01.tar.gz" in the "jeff" subdirectory of the home directory
of "ftp ftp.cs.su.oz.au" with login name "ftp" or "anonymous" (any
non-empty password).  The comp.sources.misc newsgroup is an alternative
source of Lout distributions.  The distribution contains

  *  Complete C source code

  *  Standard library packages of definitions for ordinary documents,
     technical reports, books, overhead transparencies, stand-alone
     illustrations, plain text documents, equations, tables, diagrams,
     graphs, C and C++ prettyprinting, and Pascal

  *  Complete documentation for all these features consisting of a
     User's Guide plus an Expert's Guide.

  *  A makefile and installation instructions

For those who want to browse first, an extra copy of the PostScript
version of the User's Guide may be found in file "lout.3.01.user.ps.gz"
in the same ftp directory.

Lout was designed and implemented by Jeffrey H. Kingston (address@hidden)
of the Basser Department of Computer Science at the University of Sydney.