RE: [boost] printing documentation on A4 - advice on using Frontpage portably wanted.

From: Anthony Williams (anthony.williamsNOSPAM_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-23 06:30:40

Paul A. Bristow writes:
 > I sense that the moral of the story is, as the Irishman replied when asked for
 > directions "I wouldn't start from here" - don't start with MS Word!

 Agreed.

 > But when starting to write Boost documentation next time, should one start using
 > a really basic text editing tool (I had thought I could forget how to do that)
 > or is FrontPage OK?  If using that, What guidance to users should be given to
 > avoid some non-portable 'styles'?

I would have thought FrontPage was OK --- give it a try; write a simple
document in FrontPage and look at the generated HTML. If it is full of <span>
elements, style attributes with explicit font names or sizes or other such
non-portable things, then you'll have to use something else to get HTML that
looks nice on more than one browser. If it uses plain tags, possibly with a
"class" attribute to refer to the stylesheet (which really ought to be used
consistently --- if two paragraphs are supposed to look the same, they should
both have the same class, or both have no class) then it's usable.

As for advice on portable HTML styles, I'm sure you've seen it all before,
but, here are the things I can think of OTTOM:

* Use the HTML tags to specify _what_ you want to display (e.g. section
heading, sample code, etc), and the style sheet to specify _how_ to display it
(large, bold, fixed-width font, blue text, etc.)

* Don't specify exact fonts; specify font "type", such as
Fixed/Serif/Sans-Serif.

* Don't specify exact font sizes, use "large", "small", etc., but only if you
really need to change the font size.

* Don't specify exact sizes for tables, etc. --- use percentages.

Anthony
-- 
Anthony Williams
Senior Software Engineer, Beran Instruments Ltd.
Remove NOSPAM when replying, for timely response.