Re: Yelp line width

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Hey Adrian.  Nice to see you around again.

On Sun, 2007-10-28 at 13:51 +0100, Adrian Custer wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> Yelp has improved a ton, congratulations to all! It makes the docs look
> so pretty we don't even need to worry about what they say. ;-)
> 
> 
> Yelp now limits the width of lines as you expand the window width. Very
> cool! However, this raises some questions for me. (1) What's the default
> width for the onscreen yelp? (2) what is the max width and why is it set
> to that width? (3) what width will be used in A4/letter pdf output? 

Yelp remembers what width/height you set it at.  The default first-time
dimensions are 600px wide and 420px high.

The maximum width for content is 60em.  This is set in gnome-doc-utils,
so the same thing will happen on e.g. library.gnome.org.  This width
does not include the sidebar, which floats right.  (I would like the
sidebar to stick to the right side of the content, rather than the
right side of the window, when the window gets wide, but I can't
figure out how to do that.)

As for PDF output, we still don't have a high-quality PDF tool chain
in place, but you can print the HTML in Yelp to a PDF file.  Since
the maximum width is set with the max-width CSS directive, it will
only affect the on-page width if the page is wider than 60em.  This,
of course, depends on your font size.

We really should be using CSS media selectors to fine-tune the layout
for printed documents.  I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

> I'm wondering specifically to understand how these widths impact
> screenshot size. Last we worked on the docs, I reduced the full
> screenshots to be 510px wide. Is there any other particular
> recommendation? 

Screenshots that are wider than the body will just overflow,
causing users to have to scroll left and right.  Obviously,
you can't reduce screenshots to be 60em, and you don't really
know what font size your readers are using.  I think 510px
is probably still a good ballpark width though.

To me, it's less a question of where Yelp cuts off the text
width, and more a question of how big people make their Yelp
windows.  Personally, I don't want to maximize Yelp, because
I'm generally looking at something else while I look stuff
up in Yelp.  And, of course, you have to consider people
who have low resolutions.  It largely comes down to knowing
who your target audience is.

(Cool feature I never got around to doing: Auto-scale large
images, and allow click-to-zoom.  Any JavaScript hackers
looking for something to do?)

--
Shaun