Questions & Suggestions

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hello,

again I have some questions and perhaps some suggestions for
future releases:

- Is there any way to underline text?

- Is there any way to change the font without creating a new object box?
  It should be possible to switch to italic, bold, etc. in a normal text
  for several lines without building rectangular objects. In TeX this is
  possible without any problems.

- Every font declared with a fontdef is defined in the
  postscript output as

  /fnt22 { /Bahamas-Bold LoutFont } def

  (or with LoutRecode), even if it is unused. I have a
  big font directory and I have generated a file with all
  fontdefs with a small perlscript. Including this file (to make
  all fonts simply available) generates a Postscript program which
  defines about 300 Fonts, which is much too much for a Postscript printer.
 
  Could the next release be modified to define only the used fonts in the
  postscript output?  And perhaps special commands (like @PrependGraphic),
  which include Postscript definitions (e.g. for fonts) at a special place?
  The postscript definitions for fonts should be included just before the
  first use of the font and the font should be killed just after the last
  use of the font. This would allow to use more fonts than the printer
  is able to keep in its memory.

- The unix-version should be able to read environment variables which
  contain colon-separated path-names for the include and the font-path.

- Is there any reason why names of objects, fonts ... may not contain
  numbers? I think it would be better to allow numbers also, if the name
  begins with a normal letter.

- Is there any way to do a def after the @Use command? It could be very
  usefull to define functions in the body.


- It could be very usefull to have more functions of normal programming 
  languages in lout. Perhaps for/while/until loops, if/then/elsif/else,
  arithmetic expressions, string functions etc. 



Hadmut