Lout: An alternative to LaTeX?

I tried [0]. Firefox does an ok page layout, if you print it. I did not try Prince.

One big TODO is the copyright notice in the bottom left column first page. Two column-wide figures are also an issue.

Thanks for citationstyles.org. When i have time, I'll try to integrate that.

[0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/acm_html/test.html

"its chief advan­tages seem to be speed and size: a down­load of the entire sys­tem is less than 1 MB, and takes around 5 MB when installed"

I have a 500GB hard drive.

\rant{I think it's funny that you say this, because I was just remarking to someone the other day that the primary way I've seen TeX and its little forest friends age is that it's become rather unwieldy IN SPITE OF the fact that the hardware it's running on now is far more than an order of magnitude faster.

In college, I was typesetting my work in PlainTeX (I never did like LaTeX, but obviously I had it available) on a 14.77MHz 68000-based Amiga 2000, and the TeX distro came on floppies. I had a whopping 40Mb hard drive, and all the heavy lifting lived there - Metafont, dvips, tex itself. But they fit comfortably on 800K low-density floppies and ran from them, if you needed to. The other floppies were all fonts, and since the prevailing format for fonts in the rest of the world was Type 3 Postscript (yucky bitmap) and comparable TrueType, my work looked rockin.

So to review, I had it running largely off floppies on a machine a couple of orders of magnitude slower (and a couple of orders of magnitude less memory and storage) than my iPhone. And I frequently taught freshman English majors who wouldn't own their own computer for another 3 years how to use it, down to font rendering and selecting an output format for the target printer which was rarely Postscript back then.

Riddle me this then: why are current TeX distros completely indecipherable to me now? I mean, kpathsea was always a bit of a beast, but I understood it pretty much at a glance. How is it that, although I've used the platform on and off for two decades now, in the last 5 years I've had to call the Psychic Friends Network every time I tried to call a package that I thought I had installed correctly? Oh, and why is a whole install now larger than the sum total of all the storage I had at my disposal - every floppy, hard drive, mainframe quota, and gettemp limit - when I last used the system on a daily basis?

As far as I can tell, the last update to the core product was in 2008, and everything that's been added to the main engine since 1992 has been incremental support for things like modern font formats. So it should have grown linearly, not exponentially. But there it is. Big as life and twice as ugly.

This is actually the second question in five days I've seen in two different fora about, "How is TeX holding on?" And to look at the sample output that was produced by Lout, obviously the answer is, "Because no one ever came up with a replacement that produced better output." You don't have to ask Don Knuth to figure that one out. It's not that Lout hasn't surpassed TeX yet. It's that it hasn't beaten troff yet. The 70s called, and they're looking for their DEC LP01, man.

But I don't think people are actually voicing the question in their heads. I think the question they're actually asking is, "Who let this godawful piece of Frankencode run through the village terrorizing the children, and why won't someone please scrape it all into a pile and teach it how to sing Puttin' on the Ritz like it did 20 years ago?" Or, "If you got this thing back into shape, why wouldn't it be the rendering engine for ebooks, because if it's setup right, it can render a whole book from source live on an iPad which is 100x more powerful than its original compile target?" I can think of 20 questions like this. All the questions ultimately boil down to a wonderment that one of the best pieces of software ever written for making readable output is cared for so shoddily. It's like some laboratory experiment gone amuck on how layering bad abstractions on things makes even awesome things awful. }

And now for my next trick, I'm going to go integrate XeTeX into my current product to generate custom typeset results for customers. No, seriously, I am. I see 20 more years of this platform in my future...

Not necessarily. New people in academia learn LaTeX all the time, and if more students start getting upset about having to learn it while there's an alternative that, while lacking a zillion of packages, is easy to use and just works right out of the box... then I don't see how professors would be able to hold back the tide. I've seen engineers write papers in Microsoft Word, though they're a minority. And then there's those English majors who just cajole a buddy with InDesign into typesetting their thesis for them.

The output of Latex is so annoyingly good that I would use it to make me a cup of tea if I could ("there's a package for that", comes the faint cry). I use it for essays, reports, and even our Ukulele Society's songbook. Versatile it is.

But the problem is basically this:

You have to close your eyes, cover your ears and hum loudly when installing and compiling, because if you thought about the error messages, the distro size and all the binaries involved, you'd probably wish you were dead. Nothing, no quality output justifies a piece of software like this, it's like the elephant in the filesystem. I have nothing but admiration for the people who put this together, because I couldn't fit a mental model of the Tex system into two of my brains.