@Section @Title { Objects } @Begin @PP The essence of any move to a higher level is the introduction of some abstraction which serves to organize the low-level operations, resulting in a more succinct expression of their common combinations at the cost of some loss of detailed control. The early part of the Lout project was spent in the development of such an abstraction for the building blocks of documents, one which could explain, not just the simple phenomena of words, lines, and paragraphs, but also the alignment of columns in tables, and the complex nested structures of equations. @BeginSubSections