Many questions :)

[David Kühling]

Hi everybody,

I'm currently involved with typesetting a japanese dictionary for
print, created by a group, mostly of students, using unicode XML.  The
XML sources are translated to euc-jp .tex, using jLaTeX for
typesetting.  Although the whole thing seems to work, maintaining and
extending the TeX style-definitions gets harder and harder the more
professional it gets.  Simple tasks can take hours to implement in TeX
with all kinds of strange side effects occuring later on.

This is the point where I decided to look for alternatives, even
thinking about creating a custom PostScript typesetting system.  Well,
lout seems to be capable of all the things that I need.  It's
remarkable what kind of features can be expressed in terms of the
simple concepts that lout uses.  Looking at /usr/share/lout reveals,
that there even exists a direct interface to PostScript, @Yield, which
would allow me to add japanese language support.

Still I have a lot of questions in mind, which I would like to ask,
before spending much time on implementing dictionary-output to Lout:

 * What is the current status of lout development?  The web pages I
   saw hadn't been updated for quite some time.  Is it actively
   maintained?

 * Although Google didn't reveal anything: were there any attempts in
   the past to support languages with multibyte characters
   (chinese/korean/japanese)?

 * What would be the best way to "decode" japanese multibyte
   characters in lout?  I can currently imagine two possibilities:

   - Using one `def' for every two-byte japanese character code, which
     should consist of two characters >127.  The file containing those
     characters could simply be auto-generated and would depend on the
     coding-system used (euc-jp/utf8) and the coding of the japanese
     font I'd use.

   - Using @Filter and some utility program that would decode japanese
     characters into a sequence of calls to a function @JChar with the
     character's font-codepoint passed as argument.

 * japanese line-breaking rules are somewhat special: all characters
   (should) have the same width, so all lines are automatically
   block-formatted.  But, full stop and comma (and some other chars)
   are allowed to extend the current line, so they won't occur at the
   start of the new line.  Can such a rule be implemented in Lout?
   Requires use of @Filter?

 * Although I don't need it: is there any chance that top-down
   left-to-right text-flow can be implemented in Lout?  It seems that
   at least with @Filter that should be possible.  But there seem to
   be some subtile limitations to Lout, at least I read about problems
   with balanced two-column text.

 * I didn't yet find any information in the Lout documentation about
   doing simple calculations in Lout.  Eg calculate positions for
   blobs in the margins, depending on first Letter of the dictionary
   entries on a page.  Again, I suppose this could be done using
   @Filter.  Using math with TeXs registers, you could do fancy
   things...

Thanks in advance,

David Kuehling

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