Wish list for Lout 3.21

[Henrik Martensson]

Hi,

I have been working with Lout for awhile now, primarily for book design, and
though I like it very much, I keep running into the same problems over and
over again. In order of importance, I have the following problems:

1. Header and footer width are always equal to the body text width.
   In practise, this means margin notes are not very usable, because
   in most book designs, the headers and footers extend to
   the width of the body text plus the margin note width. It is
   not uncommon for headers and footers to be even wider than
   that. (I did get a workaround for this, but unfortunately it
   didn't work.)

2. Page properties are set per document, but many modern layouts
   have different settings per chapter. For example, I have
   projects underway right now where the number of columns and
   margin widths vary depending on what the chapter is for.

3. Very long margin notes do not break properly over pages. Thus,
   it is difficult to create books that use sidebars next to
   the main text. Granted, this is not a very common format,
   but I keep running into it over and over again.
   (This one I could live with. It causes problems in an
   old hobby project of mine, but it doesn't cause problems
   at work.)

4. Chapter and section levels are named (Section, SubSection, etc.).
   For my purposes, recursion (a Section in a Section in a Section)
   would be better, because it makes it possible to reuse
   information in different documents. (A section in one document
   may be reused as a subsection in another.)
   This isn't vitally important, but it sure would be nice to have.


The first two problems are serious enough (to me) that they must be solved
somehow. (A colleague is looking into using FrameMaker+SGML as a formatting
engine for some projects, but though this would solve the page layout
problems, we have plenty
of other problems that are much easier to solve with a Lout filter. Besides,
I'd like to release some stuff into the public domain, and FM+SGML isn't
exactly free. Sigh!)

Would it be possible to include the features I need in a future revision of
Lout? (3.21?) I realise that the capabilities I need would probably require
a substantial amount of work. On the other hand, If the header/footer
problem and the page-properties-per-chapter problems were solved, it would
make Lout much more flexible when it comes to book production. This might be
of sufficient interest to other Lout users to make the work well worth the
effort.


Kind regards,

Henrik Mårtensson

---
Henrik Martensson
GNOSIS-Gruppen
Technical Documentation Services
URL: http://www.gnosisgruppen.com/