THE LOUT DOCUMENT FORMATTING SYSTEM, VERSION 3.39 Version 3.39 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 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), formatting of computer 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 and is obtainable from ftp://ftp.it.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.39.tar.gz The distribution contains * Complete C source code, makefile, and installation instructions * Standard library packages of definitions for ordinary documents, technical reports, books, overhead transparencies, stand-alone illustrations, plain text documents, equations, tables, diagrams, graphs, and computer program formatting for most common languages * Complete documentation for all these features consisting of a User's Guide plus an Expert's Guide A PostScript version of the User's Guide is available at: ftp://ftp.it.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/lout-3.39-user.ps.gz Lout was created by Jeffrey H. Kingston (jeff@it.usyd.edu.au) of the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney.