On 11/29/25 08:11, Gavin Smith wrote:
On Thu, Nov 27, 2025 at 10:42:49AM -0800, Per Bothner wrote:
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The downside is truncation for really short windows with long text, but I think
that is tolerable in this context.
It's only tolerable if the section names are short enough to fit in the width
of the screen, otherwise the reader of the manual is impaired.
I think it is poor manual design for section names (as opposed to titles) be
too long.
And if overlong section names get truncated I don't think it's a big problem
for manual usability or readability. People don't really "read" the navigation
links
at the top/bottom of the page that closely anyway. If you're using a really
narrow window
you probably expect some degradation anyway.
They can't read the name of the referenced section without scrolling.
Horizontal scrolling won't help if the name is truncated. Of course if the
links take up too
many lines you will need more vertical scrolling than one would like.
Moreover, the width of the rendered page is increased.
Usually not - the width of the rendered page is restricted by the containing
window (or containing block, if that has a fixed width).
We exchange a minor improvement
in most cases for a much rarer, more severe problem. See attached screenshots.
What is the problem? I think the screenshot is fine, given the over-long section
name and the under-narrow window.
A refinement would be to add a 'title' attribute to the span element with the
full text (or maybe the chapter/section title if available). That becomes
visible when the mouse hovers over the element. (Of course that doesn't help on
a phone or using touchpad.)
Common Lisp-style pretty-printing solves the problem, by using logical blocks
and
"linear" optional newlines. I have an implementation in DomTerm using
JavaScript.
It is a bit complicated, but it could be bundled with info.js. Basically you
run a
line-breaking algorithm whenever window size, scale, or styles change.
It is useful for other things. For example code example can dynamically use
fewer or more lines depending on window width. See
https://domterm.org/saved/dt-prettynested.html
for examples of on-the-fly pretty-printing. This a "dynamic log" of
a terminal session - try adjusting the width of the window.
Adding a <span> around the the links with an appropriate class makes sense
(Patrice used "nav-button"), but I don't think we should set the "nowrap"
style by default. It should be up to users of texi2any to add that style
if they want to.
I would use a css class, but set the default style for that class to
nowrap.Users can override it. It is just my feeling, but I suspect nowrap is a
more
generally-useful default.
That's assuming we can't find a better use of CSS that avoids this problem.
It might be possible with flexbox or some newer css feature, neither of whichI
know well enough.
--
--Per Bothner
[email protected] http://per.bothner.com/
