Lout is a document formatting system designed and implemented by Jeffrey Kingston at the Basser Department of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Australia.
The system reads a high-level description of a document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript file which can be printed on most laser printers and graphic display devices. Plain text and PDF (starting from version 3.12) output are also available.
Lout is inherently multilingual. Adding new languages is easy. The following languages are currently supported (in alphabetical order): Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish.
The following excerpt is copied verbatim from the blurb that comes with Lout distribution:
Lout offers an unprecedented range of advanced features, including optimal paragraph 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.
