Mid November 1997 This is my attempt at an XEmacs major mode for lout. It is a derivative of AUCTeX, the overly complicate *TeX mode :-) Eric Marsden has written an independent mode for FSF (regular) Emacs; get it at http://www.chez.com/emarsden/lout/ See the accompanying file MAIL for some rambling thoughts by me on the relative strengths of the two packages and some things I would like to try eventually. Volunteers, anyone? Much of it should work under FSF Emacs with very little work, (since AUCTeX does, and I have preserved many of the conditional blocks) Its present features include: (pluses and minuses) ++ Quite sophisticated font-lock (@B word and @B {two words} are correctly highlighted in bold, for example). Equations are coloured green so you can see when your brackets match. - Only really works in XEmacs and especially in the X Window System. - There's still more to do, and the fonts need some tweaking - @Title needs to be on the same line as @[[Sub]Sub]Section to be in the right font (I think I know how to fix this) ++ Comprehensive syntax table, so XEmacs can correctly handle "\"#" #comment ++ Electric quotes (from AUCTeX) - hard to describe. ("->``, ""->") ++ Electric $ (original work) - Type a few and see. + Some keyboard shortcuts; more are easily added - No documentation yet - Needs some Emacs knowledge to install and run at the moment ++ Completes lout keywords and named parameters with Meta-Tab; if this fails it'll try ispell completion * The next stage is to add the ability to run lout and jump to the error messages ** Long term, it would be nice to get AUCTeX's master/subfile commands all working so you can press a few keys to just compile the region with the right headers etc. ** Special code for style sheets and reference databases would be nice I probably can't work on this further until after Christmas. If anybody wants to work on it feel free. Happy hunting! Yours, Gordon Deane