newbie-questions

[Erich Hoffmann]

Hello Louters,


I am a newbie coming from LaTeX.  Lout seems to fit into a long felt
need for a text processing system with PS-output for myself, some other
output - PDF will do - for the Windows users I have to communicate with
and ASCII output to mail the same texts to and fro.  So far, everything
looks very promising!


...but unfortunately I have some problems...


1.) I'm using Linux Debian potato 2.2. with lout 3.12: _do_ I have to
    update to 3.17 or further?


2.) Is there a functionality to format the main text one-column and the
    footnotes two-column, like this:



    MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
    MMMMMMM(1)MMMMMMMMMMMM      [Main text with footnote-numbers]
    MMMMMMMMMMMMMM(2)MMMMM
    ---
    [1]mmmmmmm  mmmmmmmmmm
    mmmmmmmmmm  [2]nnnnnnn      [Footnotes]
    mmmmmmmmmm  nnnnnnnnnn


This is the way e.g. the italian publisher Rizzoli (BUR Classici)
formats annotated texts like DANTE's "Commedia" where you have very
little text on one page and an abundancy of footnotes.  (Or Methuen in
the ``Arden Shakespeare´´.)

The (excellent!) users's manual p. 32f. says that the footnote columns
are identical with the columns of the main text, while p.50 doesn't seem
to give a chance to change that, at least to me.  I made experiments
with the @Wide operator, without success.

If this functionality doesn't exist yet, is it *very* hard to learn
lout-hacking?  If I get the idea, the region of the footnotes is an
`object' in itself, so principally the formatting should be possible?

3.) There are problems with the @Verbatim command.  When I do something
    like @Verbatim @Begin [snip] @End @Verbatim (any @Verbatim issue),
    the [snip]ped text is not displayed, but I get this error message:


lout file "[filename]":
   20,11: safe execution prohibiting command: sed 
'1,$s/\\/\\\\/g;1,$s/"/\\"/g;1,$s/^/"/;1,$s/$/"/'             < louti1 > lout1


I know that sed is essentially and I think ``my'' sed is correctly
installed, but I don't use it and I can't read it.  What have I
overlooked and what can I do?  Why is the sed command prohibiting a safe
execution of the lout-processing?

In the mailing-list archive I only found the hint that there should be a
vertical space before the @Verbatim operator; but this doesn't change
anything.


Grateful for any comments and/or hints, and excuses for the lot of
questions,



Best

erich.