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

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

--- Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 10:32 +0100, Emmanuel Pacaud
> wrote:
> > Le mercredi 08 mars 2006 à 09:13 +0100, Alexander
> Larsson a écrit :
> > > 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.
> 
> I agree that PDF has a lot of disadvantages compared
> to HTML, and my
> proposal wasn't really what I'd call well thought
> through. However, I
> still think that reading e.g. the user guide pdf has
> a couple of
> advantages to the current yelp html docs.
> 
> For instance, if I was to actually read a large part
> of the user guide
> (instead of just look up some particular section in
> it) I'd prefer the
> pdf. With the html version the reading experience is
> very chopped up
> because the displayed sections are often very short,
> and you have to
> mouse around to find the "next section" link. Its
> also much harder to
> browse the document just looking for interesting
> stuff. And, as
> mentioned before, the pdf version prints better. 
> 
> Of course, much of this isn't really due to inherent
> pdf vs html format
> issues, but rather that the pdf is flowed over a
> continuous set of pages
> that are easy to flip through, while the html is
> chopped up into small
> sections that are sort of awkward to move between.
> Maybe we could just
> format the html into larger chunks? Say one chapter
> instead of the
> smallest level section in the document.
> 
>
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>  Alexander Larsson                                  
>          Red Hat, Inc 
>                    alexl redhat com   
> alla lysator liu se 
> He's a suicidal amnesiac matador with acid for
> blood. She's a bloodthirsty 
> hip-hop hooker living on borrowed time. They fight
> crime! 
> 
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