Re: Programming Lout Backends

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Jeff Kingston <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't think Lout is well suited to the job of being a universal
> document markup language.  I can't think of any language that is
> well suited to that task, except Nonpareil, which does not exist yet.

Hmm, that looks like an overstatement to me.  ;-)

Clearly, Lout, LaTeX, and similar systems are too "low-level" for the
job, because they are too much biased towards printed output.

However, DocBook, Texinfo, AsciiDoc, Skribilo (shameless plug ;-)) and
similar high-level markup languages appear to be well suited.  These
systems were specifically designed to allow output to a variety of
formats, both printed and on-line, with a hopefully simpler input
language than Lout, LaTeX et al.  The counterpart is that they are not
too agile when it comes to doing graphics, which is probably OK for
e-books anyway.

Thanks,
Ludo'.