Re: Uwe's thoughts on @Graphic

[Tamas Papp]

On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Jeff Kingston wrote:

> Lout relies on PostScript for non-rectangular shapes, for complex
> functions (such as deciding where to place ticks on a graph), and
> for side effects (mainly labels in diagrams).
> 
> Each of these applications represents an admission that Lout is
> not a complete document formatting system - if it were, it would
> not need to call on PostScript to do these things.  To put any
> of them into Lout would be a radical change.  I think that with
> large, mature software systems one has to accept that they have
> been designed up to certain limits, and that it won't be fruitful
> to try to push them beyond those limits.

I agree. The current implementation of Lout is a clean, compact language
for PS output. You can do a a lot of things that involve non-interactive
output formats, such as PS on plain paper, slides, etc. The PS language is
for this. It is not designed for HTML, PDF, plain text, but as a nice
feature it has partly functional implementations of some of these. If
somebody needs a language to do all of the above and a lot more from one
document, he should use some SGML DTD, there are a lot of good ones around
(eg. DocBook.) I think that Lout should be preserved as a powerful, high
level language for PS.

jabberwock

#   "Users?" cried the Consultant in disbelief. "Users?! You mean
#   secretaries, accountants, architects. Manual laborers!"