Re: Nostradamus (was Re: FO. lists as tables)

[Steve Schafer]
>[Chris Maden]
>>No, portability means that if a European designer makes a stylesheet that
>>looks good on his A4 printer, I should be able to handle it on my US letter
>>printer without anything running off the edge.
>
>That's just one particular facet of portability. If the European
>designer decides that the document should reformat itself
>intelligently according to the media dimensions, then he should be
>able to say so. If he wants the document to be paginated and laid out
>in exactly the same way, regardless of the media dimensions, then he
>should be able to say so. In the latter case, he has to take
>responsibility for ensuring that the layout is compatible with a
>variety of media dimensions, but it should still be his choice.

That's not portability.  It's what TeX calls "device independence".  The
purpose of typography is to best communicate the information contained in
content.  When paper was the only medium, designing the best possible
representation in a fixed way was the best way to communicate the
information.  But now that information can be presented to myriad users in
myriad ways, the best way to communicate the information is to describe a
series of optimal constraints, not to focus on the best possible picture of
the information.

You chose your page breaks for a reason.  Encapsulate those reasons in the
stylesheet, not the breaks.  An ideal stylesheet language will include
widow and orphan control, weighted keep-with values, different rules for
ending recto and verso pages, etc.

>>I should also be able to look at it on screen without having to scroll
>>back and forth, like I do with Acrobat.
>
>I don't follow you. What does that have to do with formatting?

Everything.  If you send me a picture of an 8-1/2x11 page with 9-pt type,
and I'm using a 640x480 monitor, I have to enlarge the page and then scroll
left and right for every line.  It gets real tired real fast.  Give me the
constraints you used to create that page, and let me apply them to my
narrower page and bigger font, and I'll be very happy.

-Chris

--
Christopher R. Maden, Solutions Architect
Exemplary Technologies
One Embarcadero Center, Ste. 2405
San Francisco, CA 94111



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