On Wed, 2010-10-06 at 18:13 +0100, Michele Zarri wrote: > On 02/10/10 04:16, Jean Hollis Weber wrote: > > We've had a lot of complaints from people who print our PDFs about our > > two-up design (which was intended for reading on screen), so I've made > > the LibreOffice template in the more common portrait design with fonts > > to suit. > > > > So, my question: should we also change the OOo template? This is a good > > time to do it, while updating all the docs to V3.3. Yes, I know we're in > > the middle of updating to the latest 2-up template, but only a subset of > > the docs have been done, and they are all still in draft, so... > > > > My vote is yes, to change the OOo template now, along with everything > > else that's going on. I was going to recommend doing it soon anyway, > > while we're setting files up for reusing material. I've been holding off > > a bit because Clayton's been working on a template for the developer > > docs, and we've been talking about the pros and cons of bringing the > > user guides into a similar look as the developer docs. The changes I > > would make now would go along with that. > > > > Comments? > > > > Jean > Hello Jean, > > If you remember we had a similar discussion when we first updated the > template and I do not think much has changed since then: you either > create a document that is intended to be printed (suitable fonts, > margins, sparing use of colours) or you create a document for screen > reading. > At the time we decided to optimize the template for screen reading. > Though we could have taken a different approach (e.g. landscape instead > of two-up) there are some practical considerations to be made, such as > the need to make sure that the current screenshots (hundreds of them) do > not need to be re-taken. > > So I guess we should start again from the same point: > do we want a template optimized for screen reading or do we prefer a > template suitable for printing? > > My opinion is that since Jean produces the book version we should stick > with the screen viewing optimized but of course I am happy to go with > the majority. In fact I would go even further make it even more screen > friendly (and much less printer friendly) by: > - making the vertical size of the page very short A4 so that two full > pages will fit on a widescreen monitor; > - and add a bit more colour in the document by changing some of the > character styles, > - increase the use of hyperlinks, >
Although I personally prefer docs optimized for screen reading, it is clear that many people do not. To address some of Michele's points: I don't think that any of the images will need recapturing only because of the proposed change in layout. Many will need recapturing for other reasons, mainly because they are out of date. In the Getting Started guide, a very few needed resizing or cropping. Producing the printed books (see note below) from the existing docs turned out to take a LOT more work than I had expected, because I chose a more book-like page size and therefore needed to resize many, many images. I have now decided to produce the printed books in A4/Letter size, which can be done directly from PDFs that are optimized for printing. Therefore, I vote strongly for going back to a template for documents that are intended to be printed, and I have created a new template (still under development as I find things to fix that I missed) and have applied it to all of the V3.3 draft Getting Started chapters. Ideally we could produce both print-optimized and screen-optimized versions, and in theory we can do that by just applying a different template -- but in my experience some manual work may be needed to clean up page breaks, for example. Still, that is something to consider for the future, if/when someone is available to do it. New V3.3 template: http://www.oooauthors.org/english/userguide3/res3/OOo3_3_chapter_template.ott/view I gave it a different name so it would not overwrite the OOo3_chapter_template.ott on people's computers. This is especially important for anyone reviewing Michele's *V3.2* updates to the Impress Guide, which he just uploaded. Note for new members: I produce the printed books on behalf of OOoAuthors through an Australian not-for-profit association called Friends of OpenDocument Inc, which was set up to be a legal entity that could handle the money involved. Jean -- Jean Hollis Weber Co-Lead, OpenOffice.org Documentation Project --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
