Re: What kind of documents are ideal for lout?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wed, November 18, 1998 at 10:16:55 (-0500), Krishna Podury wrote: ]
> Subject: What kind of documents are ideal for lout?
>
> I'm trying to learn lout because I spend 100% of my time on Unix
> workstations and I need to create good looking documents for
> presentations or project reports. Most of these documents are for one
> time use only, some (very few) may be constantly updated. Now, from your
> experience, is it worth learning lout if all I use it for is to create
> small documents for one time use only?

I too use unix, and only unix, and always have (well almost -- I was
stuck programming PCs up until the MS-Windows 2.1 announcement way back
in about 1986 or whenever).

I've recently (2-3 years ago) begun using lout for *all* documents that
get turned into printed copy (in place of using troff).  This is
everything:  FAXes and memos, business letters, contracts, proposals,
reports, documentation, etc.  That's not very many documents, mind you.
Only about 2-3 per month, but....

In fact I've found I generate a *lot* less printed copy than I used to,
but I suppose that's a separate observation and not quite relevant to
your question.  It's also partly due to the fact that I'm almost always
in front of a good high-quality screen with 1280x1024 or more
(1600x1200) pixels (hopefully in greyscale or monochrome) too.  This
certainly alleviates (and sometimes even eliminates) the amount of waste
paper I produce when generating printed documents.

I once produced a fairly lengthy newsletter (as newsletters go, about
16-20 pages, as many as 10-15 articles) using troff -mm (and tbl, pic,
grap, et al).  I don't know that I could do it quite as well yet with
lout, though I think it would be close.  Of course many hundreds of
hours went into refining the templates for that newsletter, and then
there were lots of hours put into refining every issue too.  I suspect
that once the templates were done in lout that the production time spent
on each newsletter would be *MUCH* less.  The only tricky part that I
wouldn't want to attempt yet is the "calendar of events" which was a big
multi-column table with lots of filled text items.  However even this
may be possible with lout now (or in the very new future).  It was also
two columns, and through the magic of MM had a nifty automatically
generated table of columns in one column and the masthead in the other
(which of course had to be generated last, given troff's single-pass
algorithm).

Lout makes document structure much more evident and elegant too....

Using lout for a resume (and the cover letters) is probably an excellent
exercise, and should produce a nice clean, readable, and elegant
document that perfectly suits the purpose.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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