Version 3.37 of Lout now available

[Jeff Kingston]

Version 3.37 of the Lout document formatting system is now available
(free of charge).  The system reads a high-level description of a
document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript or
plain text output file.

Lout offers an unprecedented range of advanced features, including
optimal paragraph and page breaking, automatic hyphenation, PostScript
EPS file inclusion and generation, equation formatting, tables, diagrams,
rotation and scaling, sorted indexes, bibliographic databases, running
headers and odd-even pages, automatic cross referencing, multilingual
documents including hyphenation (most European languages are supported),
formatting of computer programs, and much more, all ready to use.
Furthermore, Lout is easily extended with definitions which are very
much easier to write than troff of TeX macros because Lout is a
high-level language, the outcome of an eight-year research project that
went back to the beginning.

Lout is written in highly portable ANSI C.  It is distributed under the
GNU public license and is obtainable from

   ftp://ftp.it.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.37.tar.gz

The distribution contains

  *  Complete C source code, makefile, and installation instructions

  *  Standard library packages of definitions for ordinary documents,
     technical reports, books, overhead transparencies, stand-alone
     illustrations, plain text documents, equations, tables, diagrams,
     graphs, and computer program formatting for most common languages

  *  Complete documentation for all these features consisting of a
     User's Guide plus an Expert's Guide

A PostScript version of the User's Guide is available at:

   ftp://ftp.it.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.37-user.ps.gz

Lout was created by Jeffrey H. Kingston (address@hidden) of the
School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney.


Changes and new features introduced in Version 3.37 [September 2008]

   Bug fixes:
      LinkDest x coordinate (reported by Man and Stott) fixed
      @PipeRawVerbatim (reported by Summerfield) fixed
      @Figure PageFoot location (reported by Summerfield) fixed
      Rounding error in some uses of @Scale (reported by Courtes) reduced
      Problem with null chars in EPS files reported & fixed by Cichelli/Bader 
      In @Graph, problems with symbolsize option (reported by Garcia) fixed
      Gap before inserted hyphens in Palatino (reported by van den Hoff) fixed
      PostScript file %%BoundingBox problem (reported by van den Hoff) fixed
   @BypassWord option for @Chapter added (Courtes)
   @FontDef outside a database works now (but not recommended)
   New @PageParityOf symbol like @PageOf but returns "Odd" or "Even"
   New @PageNumberFormat setup file option (Courtes/Kingston)
   New @InitialBackgroundColour setup file option (Courtes)
   Updates to prg2lout.c for Haskell (Greif)
   New @TitleFormat, @AuthorFormat, @InstitutionFormat, @DateLineFormat
     slides setup file options (Courtes)
   In @Diag, path { doubleline } now looks right with arrowstyles open,
     halfopen, curvedopen and curvedhalfopen (problem reported by Carroll)
   @ShadowBox still has no option for changing the colour of the shadow,
     but the User's Guide now has an example showing how to simulate it
   Increased z08.c/MAX_DEPTH to 2000 (Forkl hit previous limit)
   @ContentsFormat setup file option now documented in User's Guide
   Preface of User's Guide now advertises the Lout web page
   Increased externs.h/MAX_LEX_STACK to 20 (Summerfield hit previous limit)
   New symbollinewidth option in @Graph (line width for data points)
   Inclusion of EPS files with previews now supported (Bader)
   @TitleOf symbol now returns figure captions as well as chapter titles
   Hyphenation on in programming languages, using new "Programming @Language"
   New @DocInfo symbol (see User's Guide, Section 3.7)
   @Math symbol (Courtes) has now replaced @Eq in User's Guide; @Eq is
     still available for backward compatibility

   I had one report that prg2lout was returning non-zero intermittently
   during the formatting of the User's Guide.  I have not observed this
   myself.  Presumably there is an uninitialized variable somewhere.
   It's hard to do anything about this unless someone can get a core
   dump so we can find out where in prg2lout.c the crash occurred.

   Cichelli and Bader offered a patch to include PDF files by calling
   a freeware program to convert them to EPS files and including the
   EPS files.  I declined to include this in the standard release
   because I felt that it could be done outside Lout, and because the
   PDF support in Lout is not maintained and generally deprecated.

   Strictly speaking, turning hyphenation on in programming languages
   is not backward compatible.  I've done it because I have not been
   able to think of a case where it would cause trouble.  If you find
   a problem with it, please let me know.

Jeff Kingston

ps given the large number of small changes this time around, I would
be interested in reports of successful early installation and use.