Re: PDFs for user-guide, accessibility-guide and system-admin-guide

[Emmanuel Pacaud <emmanuel pacaud univ-poitiers fr>]

Le mercredi 08 mars 2006 �9:13 +0100, Alexander Larsson a �it :
> On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 22:57 -0700, Brent Smith wrote:
> > I've been working on generating some new PDFs for the documentation in
> > the gnome-user-docs package.  I've come up with some build scripts[1]
> > that  generate some decent output using Apache's FOP and Norman Walsh's
> > DocBook -> XSL-FO stylesheets.
> > 
> > The generated PDFs are available at:
> > 
> > http://www.gnome.org/~bmsmith/user-guide.pdf
> > http://www.gnome.org/~bmsmith/system-admin-guide.pdf
> > http://www.gnome.org/~bmsmith/gnome-access-guide.pdf
> 
> Wow. These are pretty nice. Is there a chance we could pehaps make yelp
> display this instead of the html-based versions? Evince manages to
> render it with a nice index-tree sidebar and everything, so it seems
> equivalent feature-wise.

I don't think PDF is well suited for on screen reading. Font rendering
and glyph spacing make document harder to read than when it's in html.

Other points against PDF is that HTML rendering is faster, and page
layout of PDF files leaves a lot of unused space (page borders, space
between pages) with no gain regarding readability.

	Emmanuel.

> Apple uses pdfs in their help systems (although not for everything i
> think), and it looks pretty nice.
> 
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>  Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
>                    alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
> He's an unconventional white trash astronaut gone bad. She's a foxy Bolivian 
> Valkyrie in the wrong place at the wrong time. They fight crime! 
> 
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