Lout [LWN.net]

Lout

Posted Sep 18, 2025 11:36 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334)
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

I was a big fan of Lout (http://jeffreykingston.id.au/lout/), which has very clear (fully functional) language for writing was PostScript oriented from the beginning (yes, that shows the age of the project). Unfortunately, the author was never interested in moving the program to the Unicode world we live now, and especially there were just not enough packages for it to really take off. Pity.

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Lout

Posted Sep 19, 2025 18:22 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, when I read the article, I remembered Lout; a collegue advocated that in the 1990s. And already at that time it was obvious that TeX was a good typesetting engine, but a badly designed programming language, and LaTeX inherited this. Nevertheless, LaTeX has a big community behind it, and obviously Lout was unable to overcome the network effects coming from that. Will it be different for Typst or other contenders? Would it help if they built on each other rather than starting from scratch?

I looked up when Lout was released, and that was in 1991 (with work starting in 1994). The most recent release is from 2023, but apparently that just made it easier to build, so it's not sure if it is still being maintained. But then, if it works, do you really need any other maintenance?

Lout

Posted Sep 19, 2025 20:15 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

The word “maintained” can cover multitude of sins. See https://git.sr.ht/~mcepl/lout (yes, those commit message with just version numbers is everything we have, there is no better VCS repository anywhere; `whatsnew` is woefully incomplete).