Re: CVS docs PDF patch

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>]

Bart Veer wrote:
> Although it might seem more natural for the printed format to be PS
> rather than PDF, I believe that the PS files will be significantly
> larger than the equivalent PDF's. Not a good idea for an FTP site.
Definitely. Compressing the .ps would help of course, but personally I 
don't really see a problem with sticking with PDF.

>     Iztok> Indeed there are two printable GhostScript targets, but I
>     Iztok> suggest they should produce a slightly different output:
>
>     Iztok> PS should be in the standard printed DocBook format with
>     Iztok>  (define %two-side% #t) and (define %refentry-new-page% #t),
>
>     Iztok> while the PDF should be a little simplified with
>     Iztok>  (define %two-side% #f) and (define %refentry-new-page% #f),
>     Iztok> thus making it more suitable for net publishing.
>
> I think I would prefer refentry-new-page to be #t for all formats.
> That does increase the number of pages a bit, but refentry's are
> essentially man pages and are nearly always kept on separate pages
> irrespective of the format.
I'd agree.

> IIRC, A4 is 210mm by 297mm and US letter is 8.5in by 11.0in,
> equivalent to 216mm by 279mm. So US letter is slightly wider, hence
> less likely to give hbox overflows, but only slightly. Maybe that is
> a valid reason for preferring US letter.
On the other hand, things preformatted as US letter will be far too long 
for most A4 printers, but A4 things tend not to mind being printed on US 
letter as quite often it's still within the printer's "hard" margins. So 
A4 is more usable by both.

Of course since you can specify the exact size you want anyway, perhaps we 
 should just choose 210mm by 279mm :-).

Just a warning to Iztok though: I doubt this will solve all the hbox 
problems. Many of them are simply because the lines are in some Docbook 
markup which indicates it's so verbatim the renderer can't introduce a 
line break even though it's reached the right margin. I kept having to fix 
problems like this before, and many unresolved ones still exist. The only 
alternative is to change the tag or manually adjust the line. Shrinking 
everything will ultimately work, but perhaps only once the font is teeny 
tiny :-).

> Perhaps you should take this discussion to ecos-discuss. It is
> possible that somebody there has more experience with this sort of
> thing.
Probably a good idea.

Oh and to put my oar in, I think PDFs should primarily be suitable for 
hard printing, and don't really see any need to differentiate between PDFs 
for printing and for browsing. While I sympathise with Iztok's reliability 
problems, I think that is unfortunately just his printer driver and not a 
general issue.

Jifl
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