The problem I'm trying to solve is this.
For all my previous books I got the publisher to agree to accept a camera-ready PDF and this I produced using lout.
But nowadays publishers are "e-book" first and seem hardly to care about typesetting -- at least for books that won't be bestsellers.
So now I need to write in a format that will output what publishers want (typically Word, i.e., docx), but also PDF (for me to preview and check), and epub and mobi (in case publishers will accept or if I decided to self-publish).
I did try LyX but I prefer plain text + markup.
I really don't like LaTeX and at the opposite end of the scale find pandoc's markdown too primitive.
I'm experimenting with ascciidoctor and ascciidoctor-pdf (there's also an ascciidoctor-epub extension), but have pretty mixed feelings about it.
I'd love to use lout as _source_ (not target), but I really need good lout to xxx where xxx is tractable for this to work.
So I'm still searching for a plain text markup (not docbook or other heavy XML-based) that will give me the output formats I need...