Re: New Transformations in Yelp

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 14:31, Alexander Kirillov wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 00:29, Shaun McCance wrote:
> >   I've just put up a new build of the
> > Gnumeric docs at
> > 
> > http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/gnumeric/
> > 
> > I haven't worked the GNOME site template onto these stylesheets yet, but
> > it'll be very easy to do.
> > 
> > --
> > Shaun
> > 
> 
> Some comments on the output:
> 
> 1. The navigation links have changed: instead of 
> "<<< previous Contents   next>>>" 
> we now have (name of previous)     (name of next)
> 
> To keep some continuity with previous notation and avoid confusing user,
> maybe we want to add >>>, so we get 
> <<<(name of previous)     (name of next)>>>

I've always considered the <<< and >>> to look very tacky.  Those links,
by the way, could easily be changed back to Previous and Next, or to the
actual title of the thing they point to.  For a brief period in 2.3.x, I
had changed them to titles, but it looked bad because titles were often
too long.  Of course, we could use titleabbrev if present, and authors
could be encouraged to use titleabbrev (which they should anyway).

I'm still kind of experimenting with the best way to display the nav
links.  Perhaps (gasp) images could be used instead of <<< and >>> to
convey that these are Previous and Next links.  Perhaps they could be
formatted some way other than just left-aligned and right-aligned above
or below a horizontal rule.

I'm totolly open to suggestions on this.  My concern is that formatting
should not get in the way of reading.  But that doesn't mean we can't
pretty things up a bit.

> More importantly: we do not have Contents link anymore. Not a problem
> for Yelp (TOC will be shown in left pane) but for web we do want it. 

I haven't decided whether or not I want the Contents link in Yelp.  But
I definately agree it belongs there for the web.  I'll make a parameter
to control this and have it on by default.  Yelp can set it however it
needs.

> 2. Chapter titles now look like this:
> Chapter 2 How to Use this Manual
> I'd suggest adding a period or line break after chapter number (as is
> the common tradition, at least in English)

For what it's worth, between "Chapter 2" and "How to Use this Manual" is
not a simple space.  It's U+2007, a Figure Space.  This should be fairly
largeish space.  It doesn't show nearly as large as I think it should in
browsers, though.

But, actually, I agree in the case of chapters, appendices, etc.  There
are two different title formats used by different elements:

<number>&#8199<title>
<name> <number>&#8199<title>

The former is something like "2 How to Use this Manual", and the latter
is like "Chapter 2 How to Use this Manual".  Chapters and appendices use
the latter form.  Sections use the former.  And some titles just use the
title.

For the former, I think a large space looks nice, particularly since the
<number> on the former is typically of the form 2.1.3.  A trailing dot
looks odd.  For the latter, though, I think a large space feels wrong. 
Having a word in there ("Chapter", "Appendix") makes you read it, rather
than just sort of noticing the number.  And it doesn't read correctly.

This formatting is done by the template format.header.header, which is
in gettext.xsl, meaning it's intended to be internationalized.  Perhaps
I should split this into two different templates to handle each case
potentially differently.

> 3. If my understanding is correct, the arrow in menu choices 
> (File->New) is now a single Unicode symbol rather than combination of
> symbols - and >. This looks better but may cause problems if the user
> has no fonts with this symbol. Or is it included in some standrad fonts,
> such as Bitstream Vera?

The particular arrow I used is U+2794, the Heavy Wide-Headed Rightwards
Arrow.  On my system, this is provided by MiscFixed, which is something
I should probably avoid.  There are about a dozen right-pointing arrows
defined in Unicode.  Bitstream Vera doesn't seem to provide any.  A few
of them are provided by Courier.

In general, I'm rather tired of kludgy ASCII-formatting.  I really don't
want to use -> as an arrow.

--
Shaun