Page breaks in long lout tables?

[Tim Churches]

First of all, having just discovered lout two weeks ago, I have to say that
it is simply superb! We plan to use it extensively for publishing public and
population health information (which will be available from
http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/public-health - I will inform this list when
lout-produced documents are available). And it was written at my undergrad
and postgrad alma mater! Jeff, is that old PDP8 still on display in the
foyer of the rear entrance to Basser?

My question: is there any way of defining a heading row (or rows) for a
table and then have lout automatically insert this heading immediately after
a page break within a table i.e. so that the heading row(s) appear at the
top of every page of a long table? If not, could this capability be
considered for future versions? Word processors like MS Word and WordPerfect
have this facility and it is very handy.

lout documents which  contain long tables would normally be generated from a
script or program accessing a database (as we intend to do), so as a
work-around it would be possible to have the script keep track of the number
of rows being output and have it insert a @NP at the appropriate place, but
this means that the script needs to know how many rows of the table fit on a
page (messy and hard to maintain) and also presupposes that the long table
starts at the very top of a new page. Sometimes we want to have a table
start half-way down a page and then be split to the next page. I think that
having headings appear at the top of the table on the next page could only
be done within lout in this situation.

Regards,

Tim Churches
Sydney, Australia