Comment on concatenation with row/column marks

[Oliver Bandel]

Hello,

this concept is really wonderful :-)
It makes it easy to align a lot of tabular data easily.
There was a thread (older one) on this mailing list about
tables with more than 26 columns.

That inspired me to find a solution to the problem.

With a bit ot Perl I could produce test-documents
with huge number of numbers, aligned in many more than 26 columns.
I tested it with landscape and different font sizes,
as well as different horizontal and vertical distance between the  
number-entries
(and also paper size).

It was easy (ok, took some experiments) to create good readable tabulation.
It did not use frames/rules around the numbers, so it was a frameless  
table (no rules between the cells).
But readability was fine.

So, this feature allows a different way of typesetting large tables.

At the moment I'm working on a poster with math-formulas to support my  
own learning.
("Formelsammlung").
The horizontal and vertical alignment features allowed easily to align
Some math formulas from different @Eq-entries and some text  
(enumeration without @List),
just by adding
 |0.5f
and
/0.5f
and
|1.5f
at the right places, and the alignment was done by the automatic  
mark-alignment feature of lout.

That's a lot less typing and clutter than with LaTeX.

At that point Lout wins in the area of convenience.

(I thought, I could give some positive feedback here too...)


Ciao,
   Oliver