[geeks] Re: TeX vs. lout, etc

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Saturday, March 2, 2002 at 19:44:43 (-0600), Bill Bradford wrote: ]
> Subject: [geeks] Re: TeX, etc
>
> Basically I'm re-kickstarting the SunHELP book project.... I figure if I do
> it in TeX of some sort, I can then output to pretty much any format I want
> without problem, easier than doing it in DocBook..

Perhaps then you'd like to use a more powerful and easier to understand
formatting system.  It's called "lout".

A good starting point for information about it is here:

	http://snark.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/lout/lout.html

It's not quite as capable as TeX in some respects (it doesn't support
device independence except by way of PostScript), but it has a much more
logical and high-level outlook on the process of document formatting and
it's implemented as a functional programming language, so it's quite
easy to use and even to extend once you get some basic understanding of
how it works.  It's widely used in academia, but if the postings to the
users mailing list are any guide it's widely used by people in all walks
of life in almost every country in the world.

I've never really been much of a TeX fan, and those of my colleagues who
are big TeX fans generally dislike big macro packages like LaTeX and LyX
and such and they tell me that if I use TeX I should just use PlainTeX.

I used to be a huge fan and user of troff.  I've done some pretty large
projects with it using the MM macros (large two-column newsletters,
several-hundred page manuals, as well as the regular ream of business
and personal documents, etc.).  I am still an expert MM & tbl user, but
I've pretty much stopped using troff in favour of lout for everything
but Unix manual pages (which I now do almost exclusively with the *BSD
'doc' macros).  I've been using lout this exclusively for about six
years now in fact.

I've written reports (of all kinds, technical, progress, audit, etc.),
substantial documentation, memorandums, contracts, proposals, letters
(business and personal), invoices (with an AWK preprocessor), business
cards, envelopes addresses, etc. with it.  About the only thing I
haven't written with it yet is a book, but then I haven't written a book
yet either so that's no surprise!  ;-)

If you have to be learning TeX anyway I'd suggest you learn lout instead!

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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