pdf - and on Windows?

[James Mansion]

Hi,

I'm considering lout having dabbled with raw TeX, LyX and some of the markup
systems like T2T.

I'm impressed by the book on PyQT that I understand is written with lout.

Normally, I use my portable which runs XP and then port to Linux or 
OpenSolaris
under VMWare or on my servers once I'm home, so decent Windows support is
important to me.  I'm interested in getting to a self-publish result 
which will need
a PDF.  I don't currently have Distiller or Acrobat.

Is lout's postscript focus going to be a hindrance for day to day use?  
I'd rather not cough
for the full Adobe product until I know I'll actually make it as far as 
publishing something,
rather than fantasizing about doing so, but if I'm going to give it much 
of a try I'll want
something that produces good looking pdfs.  I've not been.very impressed 
by ghostscript
as a back end to TeX - I'm hoping to use something that embeds fonts as 
needed.

Can anyone recommend what I should install to give lout a fair showing?

I don't mind something that watermarks pages in a demo version so long 
as the
previews in Acrobat Reader on screen look good.

Thanks in advance
James