Subject: Re: Nostradamus (was Re: FO. lists as tables) From: crism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Christopher R. Maden) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 17:14:18 -0700 |
[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 XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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