Version 3.25 of Lout now available

[Jeff Kingston]

Season's Greetings to the subscribers to the Lout mailing list.

Version 3.25 of the Lout document formatting system is now
available.  My Department has just changed from a Department
of Computer Science to a School of Information Technologies,
so there is a slight change to my web addresses now.  The
new version is available from:

    ftp://ftp.it.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.25.tar.gz

If this doesn't work try the old

    ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.25.tar.gz

There is also a diff from Version 3.24 in the usual place:

    ftp://ftp.it.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.24-to-3.25.gz

The User's Guide for this version is available from

    ftp://ftp.it.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.25.user.ps.gz

The good news about Version 3.25 is that it contains quite a long list
of new features that people have been asking for.  The bad news is that
I have not yet been able to find time to fix all of the bugs that have
been reported to me.  See the excerpt from the "whatsnew" file below
for more details.  Obviously, releasing code with known bugs in it
is not something I find any pleasure in; but the day job is very
time-consuming here at the moment (I've just worked 15 days straight),
and I decided that it was best to get the new features out anyway.

I will now be on leave and out of all email and other contact until
29 January 2002.  If there are problems with Version 3.25 I will
attend to them after I return.

Jeff Kingston
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Changes and new features introduced in Version 3.25 [December 2001]

    Bug fixes
    Finnish additions
    Croatian, Slovakian, Upper Sorbian
    Outdent is now settable e.g. { setoutdent 0.3f } @Break object
    @InitialOutdent options for initializing outdent value
    Updated barcodes package to work with recent Lout versions (@FontDef)
    "downifneeded @Scale" like "{} @Scale" but will only scale down, not up
    @F symbol yields a settable font, no longer hardwired to Courier
    @TitleOf symbol e.g. "@TitleOf azaleas" similar to "@NumberOf azaleas"
    @IndexText option to @Book etc., allows text just below Index title
    References may be printed in order of first citation
    New @Diag link types: @HVHLine, @HVHCurve, @VHVLine, @VHVCurve
    "baselinemark @Font" option (mark along baseline rather than half x height)
    @IncludeGraphicRepeated symbol: less output when EPS included repeatedly
    Arbitrary colours in @Colour, @Tbl, @Diag, and @Graph, done consistently
    Size of small caps can be set now e.g. "{ setsmallcaps 0.8 } @Font ..."
    Got rid of boxes around links when PostScript converted to PDF
    Revised end of sentence handling for some languages
    Symbols for embedding clickable URLs into PostScript output

    I've decided not to maintain the PDF back end, but I will try to ensure
    that Lout's PostScript output works with PostScript-to-PDF converters.

Things that ought to be done but haven't been done yet

    Fix bug in table running headers code
    Fix bug in hyphenation across pages of some unusual kinds of list items
    Fix bug in index header placement when there are multiple indexes
    Column-width footnotes in full-width pages.