Re: [RFC/PATCH 3/8] docbook: radical style change

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 08:05:16PM +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>
>> Use smaller 'sans-serial' font. Sans-Serial fonts are supposed to be
>> easier to read in screens. This format is similar to the one of
>> Wikipedia.
>
> I started to look up "sans-serial" before I realized it seems to be just
> a typo for "sans-serif" (or is there something I'm missing)?

Right, I meant sans-serif.

> Is there a reason to apply this style change just to docbook-generated
> HTML? Most of the HTML documentation is generated directly from
> asciidoc.

Nope, it's just the one I'm working right now.

>>  html body {
>>    margin: 1em 5% 1em 5%;
>> -  line-height: 1.2;
>> +  line-height: 1em;
>> +  font-family: sans-serif;
>> +  font-size: small;
>
> Personally, I think collapsing the line spacing looks worse.
>
> I'm not sure I see the point of putting "small" text for the entire
> body. Since it covers the whole page, you are not "small" with respect
> to anything else, but are basically just overriding the user's choice
> through their browser of what is a reasonable default text size.

Well, Google, Gmail and even Wikipedia have a 'small' font-size. I'm
sure people don't find Wikipedia hard to read :)

The only difference with the user manual is that it actually takes the
whole screen, so it might be difficult to follow such big lines with a
small font. I haven't made up my mind yet... I think a 'normal'
font-size also looks good.

-- 
Felipe Contreras