How To Install lout on Debian 10

Learn how to install lout on Debian 10 with this tutorial. lout is Typesetting system, an alternative to (La)TeX

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install lout on Debian 10.

What is lout

lout is:

Lout is a document formatting system similar in style to LaTeX, i.e. it works with mark-up files - plain text files containing commands to control the formatting.

Lout offers a very full range of features, including

  • PostScript, PDF, and plain text output
  • optimal paragraph and page 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.

Lout may be extended by writing definitions which are much simpler than the equivalent troff or TeX macros.

Lout has several advantages over (La)TeX. It is much smaller, and it is much easier to understand how to do things in Lout (including writing definitions) than in TeX or LaTeX. Lout’s PostScript output is very small and clean.

However, it is much less widely used than (La)TeX, so there are fewer add-on definition packages for Lout than for (La)TeX and fewer local experts around to ask about problems. You are unlikely to find many Lout documents floating around the ’net.

There are three methods to install lout on Debian 10. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install lout Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install lout using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install lout

Install lout Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install lout using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install lout

Install lout Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install lout using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install lout

How To Uninstall lout on Debian 10

To uninstall only the lout package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove lout

Uninstall lout And Its Dependencies

To uninstall lout and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 10, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove lout

Remove lout Configurations and Data

To remove lout configuration and data from Debian 10 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge lout

Remove lout configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove lout configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge lout

Dependencies

lout have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install lout package on Debian 10 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.