Re: [boost] Improving PDF generation - a common look and feel?

From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-08 10:37:13

Paul A Bristow wrote:
> 1] I note that the default page size is US letter.  IMO the ISO
> Standard A4 would be a better default.  But perhaps this is just my
> revenge for all those documents that I have printed with their sides
> chopped off!

Probably easily changed, what's the most "portable" option between US and EU 
sizes?

> 2] My personal preference (and I believe it is common colour scheme)
> is for comments in green and digits etc in red (keywords in blue in
> fine).

Hmmm, I like green comments as well, but I've just copied the HMTL 
stylesheets: and I would prefer to keep the html and PDF's using the same 
scheme.  Anyone else have any strong feelings on color schemes?

> 3]  The code font is Courier.  Could it be Lucida Console instead - I
> find this a much more readable fixed width font?  Is this widely
> available on non-Windows systems?

Harder to do: all PDF readers are required to support certain core fonts, 
and I've kept to those.  Using other fonts gets you into all kinds of 
portablity / font embedding / copyright issues.

> 4]  Can some of pdf properties - author, title, subject keywords etc
> be completed automatically.

I don't know, I guess the information is there in the XML somewhere, I'll 
try and see if it's possible.

> 5]  I note that fast web view is not enabled - many will be reading
> on screen so this might be useful?

Don't know how to do that, probably an FO processor option somewhere....

> 6] Should the document be digitally signed, probably automatically.
> Does this have copyright implications?

Don't know how to do that either :-(

>> 4) Do we have a consistent location for PDF downloads: if not should
>> we have?
>
> Sounds tidy - alongside html?
>
> Would it make finding documentation easier?  I still feel a TOC is no
> substitute for an index.
>
> And more important indexing it - one the major problems with Boost
> documentation is *finding* what you want to know.  Google provides a
> useful index, but it is often confusing to use (too many hits, or too
> few).  Would a Google index of *just the documentation* be better?
> (Or is there too much documentation not in the right place?)

You can easily search the web documentation using "site:www.boost.org" to 
restrict the Google search criterian, but I admit it shows up a lot of 
non-HTML pages: Google has an option to restrict the page type in a search 
as well, but apparently HTML isn't one of the available options :-(

Thanks for the comments, John.