[en] Review §24 [page 10]

[ghost]

The two aspects that mainly affect the appearance of a document are the size and layout of its pages and the font used. [...]

I don't quite understand this paragraph.

Could you define precisely the meaning of the syntagm layout of its pages?

[garulfogb]

the layout of a page is the definition of the size and the location of its different elements, elements meaning : main text area, margins, header, footer, edges. Will maybe be clearer with figure 5.1 page 93 (english version)

[ghost]

@garulfogb: Does the author of the manual (Joaquín Ataz-López) consult this GitHub repository regularly?

It seems to me that paragraphs 23, 24, 25 and 26 are confusing (see also the issue #7 ).

You should read the following quotation from the TeXbook.

Let's turn now to the design of a format for an entire book, using this book itself as an example. How did the author prepare the computer file that generated The TeXbook? We have already seen several hundred pages of output produced from that file; our goal in the remainder of this appendix will be to examine the input that was used behind the scenes.

In the first place, the author prepared sample pages and showed them to the publisher's book designer. The importance of this step cannot be overemphasized. There is a danger that authors — who are now able to typeset their own books with TeX — will attempt to do their own designs, without professional help. Book design is an art that requires considerable creativity, skill, experience, and taste; it is one of the most important services that a publisher traditionally provides to an author.

Sample pages that are used as the basis of a design should show each of the elements in the book. In this case the elements included chapter titles, illustrations, subchapter headings, footnotes, displayed formulas, typewriter type, dangerous bends, exercises, answers, quotations, tables, numbered lists, bulleted lists, etc.; the author also expressed a desire for generous margins, so that readers could make marginal notes.

The designer, Herb Caswell, faced a difficult problem of bringing all those disparate elements into a consistent framework. He decided to achieve this by using a uniform indentation of 3 picas for normal paragraph openings as well as for dangerous bends; and to establish this element of the design by using it also for all the displayed material, instead of centering the displays.

He decided to put the page numbers in bold type, out in the margins (where there was plenty of room, thanks to the author's request for white space); and he decided to use italic type with caps and lower case for the running headlines, so that the pages would have a somewhat informal flavor.

He chose 10-point type (on a 12-point base) for the main text, and 9-point type (on an 11-point base) for the dangerous bends; the typeface was predetermined. He chose an \hsize of 29 picas and a \vsize of 44 picas. He decided to give subheadings like ▶ EXERCISE 13.8 in boldface caps before the statement of each exercise. He specified the amount of vertical space before and after such things as exercises, dangerous-bend paragraphs, and displayed equations. He decided to devote an entire left-hand page to each chapter illustration. And so on; each decision influenced the others, so that the final book would appear to be as coherent and attractive as possible under the circumstances. After the main portion of the book was designed, he worked out a format for the front matter (i.e., the pages that precede page 1); he arranged to have the same amount of sinkage (white space) at the top of each page there, so that the opening pages of the book would look unified and open.

The author hasn't actually followed the designer's specifications in every detail. For example, nothing about stretching or shrinking of vertical spaces appeared in the design specs; the author introduced the notion of flexible glue on his own initiative, based on his observations of cut-and-paste operations often used in page makeup. If this book has any beauties, they should be ascribed to Herb Caswell; if it has any blemishes, they should be ascribed to Don Knuth, who wrote the formatting macros that we are now about to discuss.

[ghost]

There is a kind of polysemic duality between what stands out in the appearance and the characteristics of the document but it is expressed in a rather confusing way.

For instance, you put the structure of the document, the references and the layout on the same level.

[garulfogb]

@gilaro Does the author of the manual (Joaquín Ataz-López) consult this GitHub repository regularly?

I don't think so.

Currently I am focusing on the french version (time consuming). Please, don't be disappointed if your remarks are not quickly taken into account or answered.