pdf - and on Windows?

[James Mansion]

Hi,

I'm considering lout having dabbled with raw TeX, LyX and some of the markup
systems like T2T.

I'm impressed by the book on PyQT that I understand is written with lout.

Normally, I use my portable which runs XP and then port to Linux or
OpenSolaris
under VMWare or on my servers once I'm home, so decent Windows support is
important to me. I'm interested in getting to a self-publish result
which will need
a PDF. I don't currently have Distiller or Acrobat.

Is lout's postscript focus going to be a hindrance for day to day use?
I'd rather not cough
for the full Adobe product until I know I'll actually make it as far as
publishing something,
rather than fantasizing about doing so, but if I'm going to give it much
of a try I'll want
something that produces good looking pdfs. I've not been.very impressed
by ghostscript
as a back end to TeX - I'm hoping to use something that embeds fonts as
needed.

Can anyone recommend what I should install to give lout a fair showing?

I don't mind something that watermarks pages in a demo version so long
as the
previews in Acrobat Reader on screen look good.

Thanks in advance
James

[KHMan]

[snip]
Is lout's postscript focus going to be a hindrance for day to day use?
I'd rather not cough
for the full Adobe product until I know I'll actually make it as far as
publishing something,
rather than fantasizing about doing so, but if I'm going to give it much
of a try I'll want
something that produces good looking pdfs. I've not been.very impressed
by ghostscript
as a back end to TeX - I'm hoping to use something that embeds fonts as
needed.

Speaking as a off-and-on user of Lout... Can you be more specific
about "not been.very impressed by ghostscript"? It used to be that
the TeX DVI -> PS -> PDF toolchain produces Type 3 fonts which are
rendered bitmaps from the Metafont stroked originals. That looked
horrible and rendered slowly. But AFAIK, nobody ever generates a
document with Type 3 fonts anymore. With pdfTeX, as with Lout,
everybody is using stroked fonts, usually the standard Adobe set
or embedded Type 42 fonts. I am under the impression that
Ghostscript works well these days.

Can anyone recommend what I should install to give lout a fair showing?

Not sure what you mean, but often we point people to the User's
Guide as an example of what Lout can produce. You can get them
here: http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/Documentation

I don't mind something that watermarks pages in a demo version so long
as the
previews in Acrobat Reader on screen look good.

No Free Software forces any watermarks on the user... I guess
maybe you are discussing a Distiller demo.

[James Mansion]

Post by KHMan
Speaking as a off-and-on user of Lout... Can you be more specific
about "not been.very impressed by ghostscript"? It used to be that the
TeX DVI -> PS -> PDF toolchain produces Type 3 fonts which are
rendered bitmaps from the Metafont stroked originals. That looked
horrible and rendered slowly.

Quite.

Post by KHMan
With pdfTeX, as with Lout, everybody is using stroked fonts

pdfTeX I've found fine, but that doesn't use ghostscript does it?

Post by KHMan
I am under the impression that Ghostscript works well these days.

That's encouraging.

Post by KHMan
Not sure what you mean, but often we point people to the User's Guide
http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/Documentation

I'm aware lout itself is fine, but I need a convenient complete
toolchain reall, and I'd rather not have to run on *nix all the time,
out of habit as much as anything.

Post by KHMan
No Free Software forces any watermarks on the user... I guess maybe
you are discussing a Distiller demo.

Well, or other pdf generators. I'm not concerned about using Free
Software per se, and will spend money once I'm sure the project is workable.

James

[KHMan]

Post by James Mansion

Post by KHMan
Speaking as a off-and-on user of Lout... Can you be more specific
about "not been.very impressed by ghostscript"? It used to be that the
TeX DVI -> PS -> PDF toolchain produces Type 3 fonts which are
rendered bitmaps from the Metafont stroked originals. That looked
horrible and rendered slowly.

Quite.

Post by KHMan
With pdfTeX, as with Lout, everybody is using stroked fonts

pdfTeX I've found fine, but that doesn't use ghostscript does it?

No it outputs directly to PDF, it uses its own internal PDF
backend, but for Lout, when you specify fonts, and you stick to
Type 1 or Type 42 (TrueType/OpenType) fonts, then you will always
end up with the exact stroked fonts that you specified.

Ghostscript sort of flattens the PostScript output from Lout into
PDF, and a lot of PDF is really a limited subset of PostScript
which renders fast. This is a well-known process that does not
involve deep magic, so there is no loss of quality between PS ->
PDF. Vector graphics and vector fonts remain the same.

Post by James Mansion

Post by KHMan
I am under the impression that Ghostscript works well these days.

That's encouraging.

If there are specific issues with Ghostscript in the past that are
niggling you, perhaps it can be discussed here on the list. The
Type 3 bitmap isn't a Ghostscript problem but a DVI -> PS problem,
I believe. Conversion from PS -> PDF is pretty straightforward and
involves no loss of document quality.

So it is not really practical for Lout to duplicate the whole PS
-> PDF thingy when Ghostscript is such a mature application that
is well-tested. Besides, conversion to PDF is usually an extra
line in an automatic build file, so it's not too intrusive.

Post by James Mansion

Post by KHMan
Not sure what you mean, but often we point people to the User's Guide
http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/Documentation

I'm aware lout itself is fine, but I need a convenient complete
toolchain reall, and I'd rather not have to run on *nix all the time,
out of habit as much as anything.

Oh sorry, I mean that you can look at the PDF of the User's Guide
and see if the quality and capabilities is acceptable to you or
otherwise. The PDFs that we (the wiki maintainers) put up are
processed using Ghostscript.

Post by James Mansion

Post by KHMan
No Free Software forces any watermarks on the user... I guess maybe
you are discussing a Distiller demo.

Well, or other pdf generators. I'm not concerned about using Free
Software per se, and will spend money once I'm sure the project is workable.

Ghostscript is widely used and I think it's pretty mature, so I
think many of us Ghostscript users will try to convince you that
you don't really need a commercial Distiller, but it's your call.
:-) What's more important is whether the capabilities matches your
requirements. Some things, like PDF bookmarks and PDF document
properties, need a bit of additional work. If you know a scripting
language, then you can do more things, like what Mark Summerfield
does.

[Mark Summerfield]

Post by James Mansion
Hi,
I'm considering lout having dabbled with raw TeX, LyX and some of the
markup systems like T2T.
I'm impressed by the book on PyQT that I understand is written with lout.

Impressed by the typesetting or the content---hopefully both;-)
Yes, I used lout for it, and for my other books.

I have a standard lout installation + PostScript Type1 fonts (in .pfa
format) which I embed in my PostScript files using a tiny Python script.
I then use ghostscript to convert PostScript to PDF and this produces
publication quality PDF.

Lout is generally brilliant: easy to learn and use (well, the hard bits
are hard but you don't often need them), excellent tables and diagram
support, very precise typesetting control (if you specify a font then
that's the font you get, no vague "big" or "small" etc).

My only caveats are:
(1) No Unicode: lout gives you Latin1 and Latin2 and symbols and
dingbats --- and that's it. (When I need odd bits of Unicode I
generate an EPS file using a tiny PyQt script and embed the result.)
(2) if you plan on using lout's indexing facilities and you're
likely to have a lot of index terms (1000s) you will need a fast
machine with plenty of memory and patience. (I have tried three
different approaches to "fixing" lout in this regard and finally
have a "solution" that reduces the pain and that I can live with.)

I only use Linux for typesetting, so can't comment on Windows.