Re: newbie-questions

[Jeff Kingston]

On Sun, 30 Sep 2001 21:10:00 +0200 (CEST), Erich Hoffmann wrote:
  > 
  > Hello Louters,
  > 
  > 2.) Is there a functionality to format the main text one-column and the
  >     footnotes two-column, like this:
  > 
  >     MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
  >     MMMMMMM(1)MMMMMMMMMMMM      [Main text with footnote-numbers]
  >     MMMMMMMMMMMMMM(2)MMMMM
  >     ---
  >     [1]mmmmmmm  mmmmmmmmmm
  >     mmmmmmmmmm  [2]nnnnnnn      [Footnotes]
  >     mmmmmmmmmm  nnnnnnnnnn
  > 
  > If this functionality doesn't exist yet, is it *very* hard to learn
  > lout-hacking?  If I get the idea, the region of the footnotes is an
  > `object' in itself, so principally the formatting should be possible?

I don't think you can do this with the standard packages at the moment.
It should be fairly easy to add, though.  I'll look into it for the next
release.  If you were starting from scratch it would be trivial, but the
standard packages have become quite complex over the years and tweaking
them can give odd results at times.  Still, feel free to play.

Lout doesn't optimize its footnote placement, so your example won't
come out as you show it, even if I succeed in getting the basic thing
going.  Immediately after the line containing (1) lout will place the
first footnote and, in your example, it will occupy the whole of its
column space available and cause the body text line containing (2) to
be bumped to the next page, leaving a blank second footnote column.

  > 
  > 3.) There are problems with the @Verbatim command.  When I do something
  >     like @Verbatim @Begin [snip] @End @Verbatim (any @Verbatim issue),
  >     the [snip]ped text is not displayed, but I get this error message:
  > 
  > 
  > lout file "[filename]":
  >    20,11: safe execution prohibiting command: sed 
  > 
  > I know that sed is essentially and I think ``my'' sed is correctly
  > installed, but I don't use it and I can't read it.  What have I
  > overlooked and what can I do?  Why is the sed command prohibiting a safe
  > execution of the lout-processing?

You must be running lout with the -S (safe execution, disables system
calls) flag on, possibly because you compiled lout to do that by default.
Try "lout -U".

Jeff Kingston