Marcel Weiher <marcel at metaobject.com> wrote: 
> On Monday, March 11, 2002, at 12:57 PM, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:
> > I haven't followed the thread but I have tried Lout as an alternative to
> > LaTeX:
> >
> > -TeX algorithms rewritten in C (and reportedly even better).
> 
>  From what I\ve read so far, this is not really the case.  The real 
> 'crown jewel' (IMHO) of TeX is the paragraph-optimzing line-breaking 
> algorithm, which is not in Lout (at least according to the Lout papers 
> I've read so far).  In addition I am not sure it has a lot of the other 
> "typography know-how" that is built into TeX.

Well, are you sure? :-) I looked around just now and even though the
homepage is unaccessible, I found:
http://www.chez.com/emarsden/lout/loutFAQ-2.html#ss2.4

It says "For example, Lout uses Knuth's (the author of TeX, on which
LaTeX is based) optimal line breaking algorithm, and has extended it to
paragraph breaking across pages."

IIRC Jeff had spent 7 years developing Lout so there might be quite a
lot of stuff in there.

My pdfs looked beautiful anyway! :-)

regards, Göran