Re: Lout *not* dead!

[Richard Cichelli]

Hi Jeff and friends,

Just to bring you up to date on our use of Lout:

The reports produced with our newspaper advertising system are now 
composed using Lout.  Never have I seen nicer looking typeset reports.

We use a custom SCS text substitution tool and companion macro processor 
to take what are Lout programs templates and then generate Lout instances.

We even generate/draw beautiful page dummies with Lout.  The predecessor 
dummy drawing program was over 112,000 LOC in C. Using Lout and our 
pattern languages only 4,200 LOC were needed to provide equivalent 
functionality.  This has been expanded to provide a near-realtime 
production page tracker and several other tools.

We introduced DTP tools for pagination into newspapers in 1987. We 
co-invented QuarkXTensions with Tim Gill (Quark's founder) and made it 
work with a very early version of QuarkXPress.   We added support for 
InDesign a number of years ago and are now very actively working with 
Scribus and the Scribus community.

Lout has been a tremendous help in our development efforts.     It makes 
a difference everyday to not just us but several thousand publication in 
19 countries who publish in five languages.  (14 of the 25 largest 
newspapers in the US see new output that is produced using Lout every day!)

We cannot adequately express our appreciation.

If you would like more specifics to share with other Lout users, let me 
know.

Thanks,
Richard.

Richard J. Cichelli
President/Member
Software Consulting Services, LLC
Suite 420
630 Municipal Dr.
Nazareth PA 18064

Sales   800-568-8006
Voice  610-746-7700
Fax     610-746-7900
www.newspapersystems.com
address@hidden

On 10/11/2015 6:02 AM, Mark Carroll wrote:
> Matěj Cepl <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > On 11/10/15 03:44, Daren Scot Wilson wrote:
> > > Lout is certainly not dead for me.
> > OK, it is not dead (like punk), it is just pinning for the fjords. I am
> > glad I have excited so many (all?) users of it to make themselves known.
> I generally think of Lout as being in maintenance mode: no new features
> but I would hope that Jeff may still help to fix bugs. Personally I love
> how generally easy it is to figure out how to have Lout do what I want,
> partly because what I want tends to coincide with what it would do
> anyway. For instance, while I certainly appreciate TikZ, I've not yet
> had a Lout diagram that made me wish I were using LaTeX instead.
>
> I /do/ worry that Nonpareil is dead though. At the least, I hope that
> the basic "lessons learned" from all this is written up somewhere -- at
> least as a conceptual overview capturing the approach -- so that if
> there is someday some successor, it is as good as Lout or as Nonpareil
> would have been.
>
> -- Mark