Organising large documents

[Mike Dowling]

Perhaps I should come straight out and admit that my large documents are
all in TeX as I use a lot of AMS maths stuff with no equivalent in
lout.  Nevertheless, the problem I have really goes for both systems.

I do not like maintaining two almost identical copies if input text, yet
I can find no satisfactory way of avoiding doing so.

Suppose you are mainaining notes to accompany lectures, as I do.  A
section on polyhedra might be included in lectures on linear programming
as well as non-linear programming, so I would like to simply include in
if and when necessary.  The trouble is cross references;  a cross
reference is only of value if the section of text to which the reference
is referring is included.  Otherwise, some other comment would be more
appropriate.

I find myself writing text much as a programmer programs.  It should be
modular, and largely self contained.  Yet, like a programmer, I would
like to enter something like

make nlp

or

make lp

or

make ss1998

to build notes for non-linear programming, linear programming, or the
course I am teaching this semester.  Each of these will leave bits out,
or include other bits, in quite complex ways.

Curently, I cannot do this.  My first question is therefore, is there a
way of doing this with lout, or does one have to edit the text each time
to rectify cross references, a tedious task to say the least?

I have also toyed with using sed or awk to edit text automatically using
a Makefile.  Has anybody evere done anything like this before?


Cheers,
        Mike Dowling