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RE: Experiences of typesetting a book with lout
From: |
Victor Porton |
Subject: |
RE: Experiences of typesetting a book with lout |
Date: |
Wed, 04 Feb 2004 17:17:59 +0500 (YEKT) |
On 04-Feb-2004 Mark Summerfield wrote:
> example). This book was typeset entirely with lout. (Jeff also wrote a
> book typeset with lout of course.)
My book (yet E-book only): "Apocalypse: Falling Golden Comet (penalty of
greedy)" is also typeset with Lout (http://ex-code.com/~porton/bible/)
> - I found that for some things def and macro were insufficient so I
> ended up writing a pre-processor to supplement the defs and macros I
> created.
My book has an XML source. XML -> Lout -> PDF is the correct way. Write in
XML. I have mocroses mainly in XSLT not Lout.
I'm going as I'll will find time to publish my XSLT to transform XML->Lout.
(Well, these are Bible oriented but easily can be extended for other XML
formats...) These will be VERY extensible very modular stylesheet to
convert any XML formatting to ANY formatting!
> hyphenation in index entries. Lout could do with far more options on
> forematter and endmatter, and should offer far more formatting control
These need to be rewritten yourselves anyway. Different books have
different front matters. I used @OnTitlePage.
> - I did not have much success with the @Colophon symbol and ended up
> having to suppy the very last page as a separate file.
I had no problem with 3.28.
> - I often got messages like this:
> 259,79: 0.3c object too high for -0.0c space; will try elsewhere
> Which meant I had to check that the image really had found a place. I
> did not find this a problem in practice.
I have (in unknown reason) at the last run:
18,91: unresolved cross reference @NumberMarker&&9.1483.comet.en.lout.1
23,110: unresolved cross reference @NumberMarker&&9.1483.comet.en.lout.2
29,9: unresolved cross reference @NumberMarker&&9.1483.comet.en.lout.3
67,102: unresolved cross reference @NumberMarker&&9.1483.comet.en.lout.4
80,57: ignoring LanguageLevel comment in EPS file
537,7: no @SectionList galley target precedes this
@SectionList&&preceding
but it seems to cause no real problems.
I can send the Lout file (remember about copyright) for checking if you
(Jeff) like. (Note that the file is autogenerated.)
> - Lout's ability to use any installed postscript font was a real help.
> We created a custom Courier font that is horizontally scaled so that
> we could get more characters per line for code snippets, and making
> this font available to lout was easy. (We wrote a small Python script
> for embedding fonts to ensure the publisher didn't have any problems.)
AFAIK, GhostScript also can embed fonts. Anyway I use ghostscript to
produce PDF from PostScript.
> If you want to write a book, then lout is a good tool to use. Our book
I write in XML, debug converting it to HTML by my XSLT. And only after HTML
is finished, I need to produce Lout. Much more convenient to deal with HTML.
> I admire the work that Jeff's put into lout and I'm very glad that I use
> it.
Yes, Lout is great.
--
Victor Porton (address@hidden)