Re: New PostScript manuals generated

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Jost.Krieger+list@ruhr-uni-bochum.de writes:

> The fonts look nice, except that in some places you use an italic font
> that's way too large (like in the A4 version on page 205:
> *backend*-status-string).

Yeah, that looked ugly.  It's not an italic font -- it's a slanted
sans serif thing.  I've no idea why it ended up bigger than the
surrounding text.  I've now made it smaller explicitly.

> The chapter gnus are nice, except the Appendices have chapter number
> 10 and nine gnus in front :-) Should that be an inverted Gnu ?

I'm going to drop two of the chapters ("Composing Messages" and "The
Article Buffer" -- they'll be moved to "Various".  They're rather
small.) and add a new "Introduction to Gnus" chapter that'll explain
the main points without using any big words, and lots of screenshots.
And Custom screenshots.

That should give us 9 chapters, if one can count "Appendices" as a
chapter.  

> I think the page gnu should be farther away from the text body, like
> under the page number.

Ah, yes, that might be nice.  I'll give it a try and see how it
looks. 

> The outer margin is quite large. Could we put something sensible in
> there (like Notes and Warnings)? Oops. There *are* gnus there, just
> not that many. Could those be centered in the margin, or at least be
> symmetric for left and right pages ?

Yup.

There'll also be toolbar icons (if somebody would make those large
versions, that is.  Pleeeeeze!) and X-Faces and smilies and picons and
stuff in the margins.  Where they belong, of course.

The screenshots will also occupty the margins as well as the body.
That is, they'll be as wide as that line on the top of the page.

> Your reference algorithm is broken. External references are horrible,
> but rare.  Internal references point to the place before the chapter
> or section, typically on the wrong page. If you use LaTeX's reference
> mechanism, make sure the "label"s are generated after the chapter
> heading.

I run LaTeX on the output thrice, but I guess that isn't enough.  :-)

First I run LaTeX to get the indices and stuff, and then it's run to
include the table of contents, and then one would think the third run
should get the page references right, but perhaps the length of the
page references skew things, so that I'll have to run it again to get
the page references right.

> (Could we have a look at your production tools ?)

<URL:http://www.ifi.uio.no/~larsi/rgnus/texi/> is where it all
happens. 

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen