Output Routine Requirements for Advanced Typesetting Tasks

LTEX’s output routine is designed with fixed layout and functionality in mind. This is even true for the current state of the new output routine work by the LTEX3 team. When typesetting things like critical editions, one may have to cater for multiple levels of marginal notes (like verse/line numbers and additional cross references), multiple and nested levels of footnotes, footnotes also carrying marginal notes, multicolumn material with synchronized page breaks and so forth and so on. It is not feasible to anticipate every possible perversion of typesetting tasks in advance. For this reason, flexible methods of allocating the various special penalties for communicating the relevant information for such material, and for interpreting, collecting and assembling the relevant material within the context of the output routine and minipage-like environments are required. The implementor of such contorted layouts should then have the possibility to allocate the required levels and layers of specialities and plug them together in comparative ease. A suitably generic core could be employed by vastly different and far more diverse typesetting tasks than just the LTEX base classes. With suitable generality, it might even become feasible to root different systems with different user interfaces (like ConTEXt) on common core mechanisms, making it easier to cross-port functionality over the various systems.