A bit of history. Back in the 1970s mainframes offered vi and emacs to edit text and the roff family and Scribe to format text for printing. Many early home computer word processors combined stripped-down versions of Emacs and Scribe. These included Mince and Perfect Writer for CP/M and later Perfect Writer, Final Word, and Borland Sprint for DOS.Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. . For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax..
Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.
The Lout distribution is very easy to compile and maintain, which certainly is not the case of many TeX distributions. The Lout distribution is much smaller (it fits onto a floppy disk) than LaTeX, and doesn't require storing tfm and pk font outlines (since Postscript fonts are used).
On the other hand, LaTeX is much more widely used than Lout (TeX has been around since the late 1970s, Lout only since 1991). It will be easier to find a local TeXpert than a Louter, and there are many more user-contributed packages for LaTeX than for Lout. Many academic journals request (or require) that papers be submitted in LaTeX. Lout uses more memory than TeX, up to 10MB to compile large documents.
Last but not least, Lout comes with very comprehensive and comprehensible documentation. The user's guide contains all you need to know for using Lout effectively - something that is hard to find in the LaTeX world because LaTeX consists of so many different packages (which sometimes don't get along all that well).
TeX originated as a typesetting language. LaTeX is a set of TeX macros that add Scribe-like document creation features to TeX. (The syntax for the added features is very similar to Scribe.) Lout, OTOH, is descended more directly from Scribe, with some features (math. equations) similar to LaTeX.
Anyway, something that fits on a floppy and has a single comprehensive user manual might be appearling to students -- or to creators of light scientific Linux distros;-)
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