Ted's comments

[Jeff Kingston]

Thanks to Ted for his comments.
 
The point is taken that a document formatting system can do something
itself, or it can offload that thing to PostScript, so that the boundary
between the two layers can vary, and tradeoffs are possible.       
 
The problem with Lout is that it does not pass this stuff down to
PostScript as an optimization, it does it because Lout itself does
not know what is really happening.  This ignorance affects output
quality, e.g. in graph layout, kerning, and non-rectangular shapes,
and in other cases means that the user has to supply magic numbers
which make the output look right.                                      

So I would rather Lout produced trivial output, not because I want
to pander to the lowest common denominator of document layout
languages, but because it would imply that Lout understood what
it was making and so had the knowledge to make it look as nice as
possible.  Given that, I would be quite relaxed about the back end
taking advantage of PostScript's advanced features if convenient.

Jeff