Re: LOUT and XML

[Michael Piotrowski]

Dick Kampman <address@hidden> writes:

> I searched for a good layoutprogram a long time. I need:
>
>  x admission to all kind of printers en to internet;
>  x a quick and simple system of distributing text and graphics on
>    surfaces (paper, screen);
>  x simple use of scalable fonts;
>  x nice transformations as in PostScript (rotations, scaling);
>  x an well interchangeable system.
>
> The first four points are all well realized in LOUT. The need of
> interchangeability is, helas, not yet available. The LOUT-format can,
> as far as I can see, not be changed to other formats.
>
> Do you have plans to translate LOUT to be an XML-dialect in the near
> future?

You wouldn't gain anything if Lout used XML syntax.  A Lout document
is a program--to translate it to something else, you have to execute
it.  Using angle brackets doesn't magically turn it into descriptive
markup.

You should look at Lout as a high-level language for describing the
*look* of documents, which the lout program compiles into a page
description assembly language (PostScript).  Thus, Lout is most
sensibly situated at the *end* of a document production chain, not at
the beginning.

If you want to print your documents, publish them online (as HTML),
and exchange them in editable (source) form, you might rather consider
to create them in XML (preferably using a widespread DTD, such as
DocBook), and to convert them to Lout for printing and PDF generation.
See my recent postings about Lout and XSLT for an example workflow.

Of course, this approach doesn't work for layout-oriented documents
like, say, magazines or posters, since these are neither the domain of
XML, nor of batch formatters like TeX or Lout.

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                                  <address@hidden>