软件包: lout (3.39-3)

Typesetting system, an alternative to (La)TeX

Lout is a document formatting system similar in style to LaTeX, i.e. it works with mark-up files - plain text files containing commands to control the formatting.

Lout offers a very full range of features, including

 * PostScript, PDF, and plain text output
 * 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, including Russian),
 * formatting of C/C++ programs.

Lout may be extended by writing definitions which are much simpler than the equivalent troff or TeX macros.

Lout has several advantages over (La)TeX. It is much smaller, and it is much easier to understand how to do things in Lout (including writing definitions) than in TeX or LaTeX. Lout's PostScript output is very small and clean.

However, it is much less widely used than (La)TeX, so there are fewer add-on definition packages for Lout than for (La)TeX and fewer local experts around to ask about problems. You are unlikely to find many Lout documents floating around the 'net.