Re: Gene Kim's comments

[Bennett Todd]

Jeff Kingston writes:
>The only time I don't use Lout is for letters.  This is because at
>present my only access to the departmental letterhead is via troff.

Actually, _that_ one isn't a problem for me. I tried, a couple of years ago,
to make a LaTeX style for the company letterhead; the result was awkward,
unmaintainable, and it looked funny. A friend did it up in raw PostScript,
and the result was prettier, simpler, and more maintainable. I then wrapped
a smidgeon of Perl around his PostScript, to insert the letterhead into a
postscript document, and now I've got a letterhead applying filter that can
add letterhead to any document following the Adobe structuring conventions.


No, the big thing stopping _me_ from using Lout, rather than LaTeX, is the
way it honours whitespace. I can type documents in LaTeX that are ``close''
to WYSIWYG, just by using word-wrap, auto-indent, and such features of
(emacs|vi|whatever) to lay out my plain ASCII text. I do hanging indents and
the whole schmeer. I can compose more easily when the text I'm editing looks
more-or-less like what will come out. LaTeX ignores this gratuitous extra
whitespace. Unless I've misread the documentation, Lout wouldn't. I like the
ideas in Lout a lot, and somewhere on my Todo list is to write a
preprocessor that takes docs in a layout I find comfortable editing, and
transforms them into input for {lout,latex,troff,...}. Sadly, it's not at
the top of the todo list.

-Bennett
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