Programming Lout Backends

[Christoph Angerer]

Hello,

I am totally new to the list and also to lout. Since I didn't find an  
answer to my question, neither in the manuals nor in the archives, I  
hoped that you guys might be able to help me and give me some hints.

I am developing a small intranet page where users should be able to  
upload (lout?) documents and other users should be able to download  
those documents in different formats for different ebook readers.

I would prefer lout over latex as the user input, because it seems to  
be much easier to use for non-experts. (but their documents are  
currently rather simple anyhow, so even rich text would do:)

Because the whole ebook reader business is still pretty new, every  
company seems to use their own formats. This whole ebook conversion  
field is a total mess (http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E- 
book_conversion). A lot of those devices can display PDFs, if they  
have to, but those devices are only really happy with their own  
format. (a lot of the current formats seem to be variants of HTML in  
nature).

My idea would have been, to use lout as the "lingua franca" and  
provide different backends in lout to generate the formats directly  
instead of trying to convert postscript files into mobipocket files.

My question is now: does anybody think this is feasible? How difficult  
is it (in practice) to write another lout backend? As I said, the  
input documents are–at least for now–rather simple texts with sections  
and subsections and maybe sometimes boldface font or a quote.

In the lout source code, backends look pretty well modularized; I am  
thinking of the typedef struct back_end_rec in externs.h that seems to  
provide some plugin functionality. So is it as simple as providing  
implementations of those 26 functions to produce a file in a  
completely new format? Or are there some caveats or am i missing  
something? (Since the PDF backend is kinda discontinued it makes me  
think that this might be harder than it looks...)

Sorry for the somewhat long email:) But thank you very much in advance  
for any thoughts or pointers you can give me.

Christoph