some lout puzzles from comp.lang.functional

[John Atwood]

Over in comp.lang.functional there's a thread about lout and people are 
wondering what lout can do. Any lout'ers got handy solns for any of these
puzzles?


John Atwood
------------------------------------------------------
George Russell wrote:
>>
Could they be easily solved in Lout?  Code would be nice, especially for
(1) which should be a piece of cake.

(1) Catchwords.  I want the first word (or part-word, if there is a
    hyphenation) of page N+1 to appear at the bottom right of page N.
(2) German hyphenation.  Allow two or more levels of hyphens with
    different penalties.  (Score -50 if you hyphenate here or -100 if you
    hyphenate here.)  Make "Ecke" automatically hyphenate as "Ek-ke".
    (Both these can I think be done using TeX if you preprocess everything
    and insert lots of \discretionary's.

(3) Music.  I know there exists a myriad of public-domain
    music-typesettingsystems, some of which are implemented via TeX, but
    from what I'veheard (I've not tried them myself) they are none of them
    ideal.  Problems that need to be solved:
    
    (a) where reasonable, fill the whole page without varying the spacing
        too much.
    
    (b) multi-part music should be set with notes or words occurring
        at the same time instant in the same vertical line.  At the same
        time try to keep the stretch fairly constant in each stave, so
        that four consecutive quavers should be equally spaced.  So you
        really need a stretching algorithm that simultaneously balances
        stretching on several staves.
    (c) allow modern composers to insert weird symbols to their heart's
        content.
If Lout can solve all these, then I am prepared to be very impressed.
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Torben AEgidius Mogensen wrote:
>>
I'll add a few:

Text flowing around figures. In TeX, a figure is the full width of the
page (or column). I would like to have narrow figures take up only a
fraction of the width and have text next to it. Non-rectangular
figures would be nice as well, but are not essential.

Better error-messages. If you forget to close a group, the LaTeX error
message isn't very informative.

Better graphics. The picture environment in LaTeX is fairly limited. I
know tehre are many packages around that improve on this, but it would
be nice to have a standard package that effectively supports
Postscript's graphical primitives.

Locally scoped cross-references. In LaTeX labels are global. It would
be nice to have labels that only extend to the current
section/chapter/file/whatever. This way you don't have to worry about
making globally unique labels.
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