THE LOUT DOCUMENT FORMATTING SYSTEM, VERSION 3.17

Version 3.17 of the Lout document formatting system is now available
(free of charge).  The system reads a high-level description of a
document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript, PDF or
plain text output file.

Lout offers an unprecedented range of advanced features, including
optimal paragraph and page breaking, automatic hyphenation, PostScript
EPS file inclusion and generation, equation formatting, tables, diagrams,
rotation and scaling, sorted indexes, bibliographic databases, running
headers and odd-even pages, automatic cross referencing, multilingual
documents including hyphenation (most European languages are supported,
including Russian), formatting of C/C++ programs, and much more, all
ready to use.  Furthermore, Lout is easily extended with definitions
which are very much easier to write than troff of TeX macros because
Lout is a high-level language, the outcome of an eight-year research
project that went back to the beginning.

Lout is written in highly portable ANSI C.  It is distributed under the
GNU public license as follows:

   ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.17.tar.gz

In other words, in a gzipped tar file called "lout-3.17.tar.gz" in the
"jeff/lout" subdirectory of the home directory of "ftp ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au"
with login name "ftp" or "anonymous" using any non-empty password.  The
distribution contains

  *  Complete C source code

  *  Standard library packages of definitions for ordinary documents,
     technical reports, books, overhead transparencies, stand-alone
     illustrations, plain text documents, equations, tables, diagrams,
     graphs, C and C++ program formatting, and Pascal

  *  Complete documentation for all these features consisting of a
     User's Guide plus an Expert's Guide

  *  A makefile and installation instructions

For those who want to browse first, a PostScript version of the User's
Guide may be found in the same ftp directory:

   ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.17.user.ps.gz

Lout was designed and implemented by Jeffrey H. Kingston (jeff@cs.usyd.edu.au)
of the Basser Department of Computer Science at the University of Sydney.