Lout and page classifications

[Jeff Kingston]

Printing a subset of the pages is the sort of thing one does with
a post-processor.  There are plenty of these around; if you can't
find one I can send you one myself that allows you to type e.g.
 
    pfilter -pi-iv -p 6-45
 
to get pages i-iv and 6-45 printed.                         
 
Your other job, about classifying paragraphs etc and printing the
highest classification, is possible but would require a solid
piece of expert Lout programming.  Basically you need to embed
cross references giving the classifications, which would not be
difficult, and then write a fairly tricky thing to put in the
page header, of the form "if the following page contains an M,
then print M; else if it contains a C, then print C, ..." which
can be done but not just by setting options to the existing formats.
 
Lout could even be configured to generate different PostScript
page numbers from the printed page numbers, e.g. I'm pretty sure
it would be possible to make the PostScript page numbers
 
    U1
    U2
    C3
    M4
    U5
 
etc, which could form the basis of a page subset printer which
would print, say, only the unclassified pages.  But that would
be a fair amount of work.

Jeff Kingston