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

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 16:30 -0500, Brent Smith wrote:
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 09:54 +0200, Sean Wheller wrote:
> > 
> >>On Wednesday 08 March 2006 07:57, 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.
> >>>
> >>
> >>Nice one Brent
> >>
> >>To help take care of those widows and orphans try adding
> >>
> >>
> >>	    <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('pagebreak')">
> >>	        <fo:block break-after="page"/>
> >>	    </xsl:template>
> >>
> >>to custom.xsl
> >>
> >>Then you will be able to force a page breaks in your output using
> >>
> >><?pagebreak?>
> >>
> >>Let me know if there is anything else you need.
> > 
> > 
> > DocBook provides an element for this:
> > 
> > http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/beginpage.html
> > 
> > I'd be very surprised if it doesn't work already
> > with Norm's stuff.
> > 
> > --
> > Shaun
> > 
> 
> The question is, do what want all our level 1 sections to start a new
> page?  I've tried this already by modifiying the
> section.title.level1.properties attribute-set, and I don't think it's a
> good idea.  Some level1 sections are very short and it makes a page that
> is primarily blank.
> 
> With the processing instruction, I could go through and mark places
> where I see orphans, but I would have to do this _right_ before the 
> release, as any changes made earlier in the document can change where
> orphans appear, etc.

Well, what I'm saying is that you don't need the processing
instruction.  That element should do exactly the same thing.
And you're absolutely right that inserting manual page breaks
is pretty much the last thing you do.

Smart systems do this sort of stuff nearly automatically,
often allowing discretionary page breaks to provide extra
hints to the algorithm.  Proper pagination is one of the
things that distinguishes high-quality prints.

The most beautiful prints have a human at the final stage.
It's very hard to quantify aesthetics completely.

--
Shaun