Re: Gnome user's guide line length?

[Pat Costello <Patrick Costello Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 15:12, Ben FrantzDale wrote:
> Looking at 
> http://www.gnome.org/learn/users-guide/gnome2.0-users-guide.pdf
> and
> http://docs-pdf.sun.com/817-1027/817-1027.pdf (found at
> http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-1027?q=GNOME&s=t)
> the content of the two are essentially the same, but the line length of
> the latter is much shorter (and hence more readable) than the official
> GNOME version.
> 
> According to The Elements of Typographic Style (page 27), "more than
> 75 or 80 characters is likely to be too long for continuous reading."
> 
> I am wondering what the rationale are behind the current style sheet and
> what could be done to make the GNOME version more readable.
> 
> (Please CC me, I'm not on this list.)

John Fleck asks: 
> 

Indeed, the Sun version does look nicer and read more easily. Any
volunteers with the time and/or pdf generation expertise to work on
this?
>
>
Sander says: 

> 
> I think the potential gotchas in this are:
>      * the docs.sun.com versionismade with different tools
>      * the docs.sun.comversion is with different, sun-specific templates
> 
> I suspect both may be true, so it may well be amore generic tools & 
stylesheets
> problem
> 

Pat's points: 

It is true that there are stylesheet differences in the Sun pdf output and the 
GDP pdf output, however these might be an acceptable tradeoff. The Sun 
stylesheet differences do not convey a specific Sun identity as such. I will 
discuss this topic with Eugene and Irene, and provide a more complete response 
later today.

Pat