[snip] > > Might it be better to pick an absolute font size instead of the > relative-percentage type? That would create a dependency that really is not > needed.
The rationale for using percentages was to try to have a high degree of flexibility in the template so that it would be easy to convert the layout from optimized for screen (as it is now) to optimized for printing (as it was the template for the OOo2.x guides). See my last few paragraphs in this email. > > > I picked the Default because the OOoHeading style had the same typeface as > OOoTextBody. Myself, I would use different typefaces for headings and body > text. Then the typeface for the headings would be entered in OOoHeadings and > afterwards inherited to the OOoHeading x styles. It is true that the same typeface was used, however you will notice that OOoHeading was using the sans versionwhile OOoTextBody was using serif version. We tried to use a font which is available both on Windows and Linux and the choices were quite limited (BitStream Vera, Deja Vu). Although I do not mind linking every style to the default, I guess we should then revert other changes I made. In the standard template all the styles depend on the Default style and what I did was to "replace" the Default style with OOoTextBody, so I pulled headings, footers, footnotes, subtitle, table styles and all the rest under OOoTextBody, which became de facto the new default. If we now move the OOoHeadings back under default, then we should probably also move other styles back under Default. I will think about it a bit. > > > Do whatever you want with the template. The older one is still way at the > bottom of that Web page. I like very much the changes you made and they were most needed, so what I will do is to build on your version of the template. I have also started to add some information on the styles structure so that other people may contribute to it. > > > And I keep forgetting again why we went to the 14-pt body text. Was that > done for accommodating those with poor eyesight? It does seem overly large. > And some of the pages contain little text when large words are encountered > and a line is terminated quite a bit away from the EOL. The idea was to optimize the guide for screen viewing and in these days of widescreens the best option was a landscape orientation with two columns. We tried that, however it required quite a large amount of work as most of the figures were too large to fit in a column and shrinking them affected their readability very badly. So we came up with the current design which still uses an A4 in portrait orientation but allows to show two pages side by side @85% zoom on a screen with 1280pixels horizontal resolution. This is a feature that all the PDF readers I know also offer. To simulate the two colums effects we shrinked the inner margin considerably and indeed if you switch to the book mode layout (first icon to the left of the zoom slider) you will see that the impression is of a 2 columns landscape oriented document). Now the issue with having two pages on the screen @85% zoom (we took the conservative assumption that most of the people have a monitor with 1280pixels) was that the font size was too small and therefore hard to read. To solve the problem we increase the font to 14pt so that at 85% it shows like a 12 point size. As I stated earlier the design of the template was made keeping in mind the need to reduce the font size when creating a version optimized for printing. All you need to do (in theory) is: - change the body text font size from 14 to 11-12pt - (in the new template) change the heading baseline from 21 to 16-18 I hope this explains :-) I will try to upload a revised version of the template later this week so you can take a look and tell me what you think. Cheers, Michele
