
         THE LOUT DOCUMENT FORMATTING SYSTEM, VERSION 3.04
       (SNEAK PREVIEW OF THE FORTHCOMING STABLE VERSION 3.05)

Version 3.04 of the Lout document formatting system is now available
(free of charge).  The system reads a high-level description of a
document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript file which
can be printed on many laser printers and graphic display devices.

Lout offers an unprecedented range of advanced features, including
optimal paragraph 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, and much more,
all ready to go.  Furthermore, Lout is easily extended with definitions
which are very much easier to write than troff of TeX macros because
Lout is a high-level language, the outcome of an eight-year research
project that went back to the beginning.

New features introduced in Version 3 include plain text output, support
for multilingual documents including hyphenation (most European languages
are supported, including Russian), packages for overhead transparencies,
graphs, and C/C++ programs, many enhancements suggested by users, and an
all-inclusive User's Guide.

Lout is written in C and is highly portable to Unix systems.  It is
distributed under the GNU public license as follows:

   ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/jeff/lout.3.04.tar.gz

In other words, in a gzipped tar file called "lout.3.04.tar.gz" in the
"jeff" subdirectory of the home directory of "ftp ftp.cs.su.oz.au" with
login name "ftp" or "anonymous" using any non-empty password.  The
comp.sources.misc newsgroup is an alternative source of Lout
distributions.  The distribution contains

  *  Complete C source code

  *  Standard library packages of definitions for ordinary documents,
     technical reports, books, overhead transparencies, stand-alone
     illustrations, plain text documents, equations, tables, diagrams,
     graphs, C and C++ prettyprinting, and Pascal

  *  Complete documentation for all these features consisting of a
     User's Guide plus an Expert's Guide

  *  A makefile and installation instructions

For those who want to browse first, a PostScript version of the User's
Guide may be found in file "lout.3.04.user.ps.gz" in the same ftp directory.

Lout was designed and implemented by Jeffrey H. Kingston (jeff@cs.su.oz.au)
of the Basser Department of Computer Science at the University of Sydney.
