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Lesson formatter
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PDFs are too long – consider removing padding / auto-resizing images #148

Closed rikcross closed 5 months ago

rikcross commented 9 years ago

We've had more than one volunteer comment that the PDFs for the new projects are quite lengthy (the PDF for 'Lost in Space' is currently 19 pages). This is partly due to the number and size of images. For example, a screenshot image of the Scratch stage takes up about 1/2 an A4 page:

screen shot 2015-02-24 at 14 42 12

I'm not sure what the solution is here? We could:

There's also a lot of wasted space around tall thin images:

screen shot 2015-02-24 at 14 47 11

Could we text-wrap or anything (I'm aware that's probably really difficult to implement)?

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

cc. @roswilliamscc

martinpeck commented 9 years ago

Presumably the layout of the web page, or the PDF when views on screen, is less of a issues - it's the size of the printed material that's a problem, right? It certainly looks like we have a lot of white space, but I wonder if that's a good thing to maintain - increasing the density of the print outs might make them less accessible and harder to follow.

andylolz commented 9 years ago

Yeah – I think whitespace is definitely an issue with the PDFs. There’s probably scope for tightening up without making PDFs harder to follow. I’ve reopened #99.

That won’t take a PDF from 19 pages to <10, though. I’m tempted to say (very controversially) that this seems like an editorial issue, rather than a technical one. The big screenshot could be a smaller screenshot; the tall, thin image could perhaps be a short, wide image. hides

rikcross commented 9 years ago

haha i was hoping i wouldn't have to manually resize images :/

rikcross commented 9 years ago

Hey @andylolz I just noticed you changed the title of this issue. Does this mean we can auto-resize images for the PDF with CSS, or does it mean that I should manually resize all images?

andylolz commented 9 years ago

Nah – I was just rewording because I’m a pedant! Sorry. “Length of PDFs” is more like a topic – you have to click in and read the description to understand what it’s about. Current title is more of a summary of the issue.

I’m nervous about the idea of resizing images for the PDF only – I can imagine it producing weird results some places. I’m really not sure of a better solution, though…