3. Lout Packages

3.1 Can I produce HTML from my Lout documents?

The short answer is no, not easily. The problem is that Lout is quite different from HTML. Lout is a powerful language which allows you to place text or graphics at a specific point on the page, and the ease with which this is possible is one of its nicest features. HTML is --purposefully-- very poor in this respect.

This being said, in the same way that Lout can be told to produce plain text output rather than Postscript, it could also produce HTML. As Jeff Kingston has pointed out, this would require writing another backend which produces HTML equivalents for all the Lout formatting tags, ignoring those it can't render correctly.

Another way of proceeding would be to use a postprocessor (a Perl script, for example) to carry out the conversions, stripping out unconvertible information. This is the way latex2html works.

You may want to consider using another package if you need to export to many different formats. Other packages you might use include

• Texinfo (distributed with GNU Emacs) lets you produce info files (the GNU hypertext format), Postscript (via TeX) and HTML.
• POD is the format for documentation used in the Perl world. POD uses a very simple markup and can be converted to Postscript, man pages, formatted text, etc.
• SDF (Simple Document Format) is available from www.mincom.com/mtr/sdf.

3.2 Is there an Emacs mode for Lout?

There are two Emacs modes at www.chez.com/emarsden/lout.

3.3 Is there an archive of user-contributed document formats?

Nimrod Zimerman maintains an archive at http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/raytrace/358/lout/index.html.