On 19 Dec, 19:52, excord80 <excor...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Dec 4, 2:42 pm, Alan G Isaac <ais...@american.edu> wrote: > > > Mark Summerfield wrote: > > > "Programming in Python 3: > > > A Complete Introduction to the Python Language" > > > ISBN 0137129297 > > >http://www.qtrac.eu/py3book.html > > > OMG, you really wrote it in Lout? > > I wish you would add tohttp://www.qtrac.eu/lout.html > > a comment on what you get out of that > > (compared to using e.g., LaTeX or > > reStructuredText). > > I'm also curious about why you chose Lout over LaTeX or reST.
It seems to me that markups can be broken into two groups: semantics- oriented (reST, docbook, etc), and output oriented (lout, LaTeX). For books I want the best possible typesetting control and don't care about semantics (since I don't repurpose my text), so I chose an output oriented markup. (I know this is a gross simplification --- I'm not trying to start a religious debate.) I haven't used LaTeX much, but here're my main reasons for using lout: - easy to do easy stuff; hard stuff possible - everything in one package (tables, equations, drawing, charts, etc) - I can't draw but I can tell lout to draw for me and that works well for my simple needs - embedding graphics (e.g., screenshots) is easy (just convert to EPS) - lout lets me specify Type1 fonts so I can easily use my own custom Venus font for code & it is easy to embed it which makes publication easier - lots of books that use LaTeX have a certain sameness & I don't like the computer modern fonts (IMO -- no offence intended) - after more than a decade of using lout I can pretty well get it to do anything & everything I want (but I don't claim to be an expert user) IMO lout has three major downsides: - doesn't support Unicode - doesn't support Type1 fonts (well, apparently it does but I haven't managed it) - is much slower than LaTeX; so I'm told, but never been a problem for me except: - the design of the support for indexes is awful & index generation is slowwww (If you want to know how more about lout please ask me off-list or ask on the lout mailing list since this is now way off-topic:-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list