Re: Floating figures are naughty

[Mark Burton]

From: address@hidden (Jeff Kingston)
Subject: Re: Floating figures are naughty
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 09:16:28 +1000

> More generally, you can't expect Lout to produce perfect-looking output
> all the time.  I quite frequently rewrite documents, at the very end,
> to improve the layout.

I am quite happy to "tweak" a hand written document to improve its
layout. However, most of the Lout I use is mechanically transformed
from SGML source and Lout's inconsistent placing of figures is turning 
out to be a real pain.

I wholly appreciate that the output produced from transformed SGML
source will never look as good as a hand crafted document. But I do
expect the output to be consistent and correct in the sense that no
parts of the document are actually missing or have been placed in
really daft positions.

It seems to me that Lout should always abide by rules like these:

1 - No figure is actually thrown away i.e. no more "galley @SendEncl
    deleted (never attached)" messages.

2 - A section that has a gap of "2b" really does appear at the start
    of a new page even though the previous section contained figures.

If these rules (and possibly others) were followed then at least the
output would be usable even if not optimally layed out.

Although it probably wasn't designed as a backend formatter, Lout is
potentially a really good system for use with SGML. It's easy to
install, mostly OS independent, reasonably fast, produces good quality
output and above all, easy to generate. If it became a little bit more
dependable it would be really useful in this role.

Regards,

Mark