I played around with Lout for a good while during my brief fling with alternative typesetters; this included tracking down some of the (quite scarce at the time

I played around with Lout for a good while during my brief fling with alternative typesetters; this included tracking down some of the (quite scarce at the time and still not easy to find) troff macro documentation. It's cute and I liked that the language was generally sane but ultimately the typesetting quality was noticeably inferior to TeX even for block text; for setting mathematics Lout manages to make almost every single decision subtly wrong. Lout text quality is about comparable to troff in this way. If I'd never seen TeX it would look probably fine, or at least acceptable, but I can't stand to look at it today.