Hi, Michele,
Do you think some of the following (your) explanations belong in the
*File > Properties > Description > Comments* part of the template? I
suggest that the design considerations should be recorded. /tj/
Michele Zarri wrote:
--
T. J. Frazier
Melbourne, FL
(TJFrazier on OO.o)> [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
