Columns

[Marisa Lohr]

Having been urged by others to consider Lout for typesetting my 
documents, I have been reading the Lout manual.  It looks great, but I am 
concerned about the use of columns of text.  While I can set up a 
document to be in multicolumn format as a whole, it seems I cannot switch 
to multicolumn format from single column format part-way through a 
document.  I thought I could get round this by setting up a document in 
multicolumn format and then switching to Full_Width where required, but 
the manual informs me that a new page will be started every time I do 
this (which would look ridiculous in many cases).  Use of a table would 
not be appropriate either, since I want to enter alphabetically-ordered 
lists of words, going down the page in the first column, and then
continuing in the second column, and the third, and so on.  Since the lists 
are extremely long in some cases, it would be unbearable to have to enter 
whole rows at a time.

Essentially, I want something like this appearance as the result:

<title of list 1 extending across full width of screen>
Aa*       Ge*       Lo*      St*       Ur*
Ab*       Gh*       Lo*      Su*       Us*
Ac*       Gi*       Lu*      Ta*       Ut*
etc.

<title of list 2 extending across screen>
<as above>

The lists all come one after the other, though some are followed by brief 
full-width explanations.  While some lists extend over more than a page, 
others are fairly short (which would make repeated starts on new pages 
look odd).

Is there any simple way I can do this in Lout, or will it require lots of 
personal customization?  Surely it is not a very unusual thing to want to 
do - books and articles contain such lists all the time.

Thank you.

M Lohr