Extended colour support in Lout

[M. van Beilen]

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Hi everyone,

I am new to Lout. I generally like it a lot, especially its
cleanliness compared to the 1,398,382 different packages in a
standard TeX distribution, as well as the increased layout
control.

I was, however, horrified by the way in which non-predefined
colours had to be included. The construct with "nochange" and
"@SetColor" is a mess, especially when both PS and PDF output are
required. So, I made up this little patch. With it, you will be
able to use "{ rgb 0.9 0.8 0.7 }" anywhere you can use "white",
"blue" etc. I even included some simple error checking, so that
mistyped colour names will generate a warning and invalid PS/PDF.

Note that the word 'rgb' is slightly misleading, as anything
after rgb is included in the .ps or .pdf without warning. (So
type carefully.) This means you can use it in other colourspaces
(like CMYK) as well.

Now that I have your attention, I would also like to point out an
error in the user documentation. "bgr_colo" (page 174 of the
resulting PDF) describes how non-standard colours can be created.
Quote:

===
The standard Lout "@SetColour" symbol can provide many more
colours, although they must be specified using numbers rather
than names. For example, "{ 0.5 0.5 1.0 } @SetColour Hello"
prints @Code Hello in a colour containing red at intensity 0.5,
green at [....]
===

This generates faulty output without errors or warnings, and
should read "{ 0.5 0.5 1.0 setcolor } @SetColour Hello". This
will still generate erroneous PDF files however and the user
should be warned about this.


And now, the patch. This patch is against "bsf" in the standard
include directory, usually "/usr/lib/lout/include" or something
similar. (The default 3.24 makefile puts it in
"/usr/staff/jeff/lout.lib/include".)

===[ begin bsf.patch ]============================================
+-- bsf.orig    Fri Apr  6 20:12:56 2001
+++ bsf Fri Apr  6 21:41:06 2001
@@ -73,6 +73,12 @@
                lightgrey       @Yield  { 0.8 0.8 0.8 }
                black           @Yield  { 0.0 0.0 0.0 }
                white           @Yield  { 1.0 1.0 1.0 }
+               else @Yield {
+                   { rgb @Common col } @Case {
+                       BadColorName    @Yield { BadColorName }
+                       rgb             @Yield { rgb @Rump col }
+                   }
+               }
            }
        }
 
===[  end  bsf.patch ]============================================


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From: "M. van Beilen" <address@hidden> 
To: address@hidden
Subject: Extended colour support in Lout
PGP: SD
X-S-Issue: address@hidden 2001/04/06 23:51:01 9091f9f3ed84990890c8643d4b9888fd
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