>> Well, it's not about the existing layout – even if we are going to >> use double-sided formatting, it wouldn't change much (besides some >> shifts in page numbering). The thing is that only in double-sided >> mode I can easily arrange the documentation to make the visual >> index appear on facing pages. > > [...] In the NR, there are some sections of prose followed by > relevant code snippets and the rendered result that sometimes > awkwardly span across a page break, requiring flipping back and > forth.
Indeed, this can be manually improved by inserting proper `@need` instructions. Note that it can only be improved and not fixed; in general, it is impossible to have a book-like layout with so many examples and just a few words plain text inbetween. With 'book-like' I mean non-ragged page bottoms that don't have excessive vertical space on the pages. > For single-sided formatting, the only option is to try to fit things > to one page; but with double-sided formatting, you would have the > option to utilize facing pages. This is a *hard* problem. Knuth's TeX engine has no support for that. There is active research to implement something like that for LaTeX using LuaTeX. But even if this might be possible to a certain extent, there are far too much examples to achieve good results for all of them. > But again, I do not think double-sided formatting is strictly > required for much of the existing content. The new visual index > would be one of the few things that I think benefits reliably laying > out side-by-side. Well, we don't have to take care of it at all; it's just inserting this single line of code I mentioned, and everything else is happening automatically. BTW, it would also make sense to improve the appendix holding the cheat sheet to cover exactly two pages; this could be a second benefit of two-side layout. Werner