sile-typesetter / sile

The SILE Typesetter — Simon’s Improved Layout Engine
https://sile-typesetter.org
MIT License
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Big empty spaces in some pages of the manual #890

Open hmslima opened 4 years ago

hmslima commented 4 years ago

I saw the manual (version v0.10.4) and I noticed some problems. Some of them already were reported (#860/#859), but I didn't see anyone commenting about these empty spaces in the manual (if someone already did, I am sorry for doing this duplicated report).

In the page 20 of the PDF (labeled as page 15 by the document), the code (this one <font family="Times" size="10pt">Hi there!</font>) jumps for the next page while there is plenty of space left in the previous page.


Another problem, that is related to empty pages, is with new chapters. I know that when you make a chapter...

\chapter{New Chapter}

..., this title will appear in a new page; that's nice! But this new title leaves an empty page behind it or not?

Chapters that are preceded by an empty page: 1 (What is SILE?), 4 (Some Useful SILE Commands), 5 (SILE Packages), 6 (SILE Macros and Commands), 8 (The Nitty Gritty), 11 (Further Tricks) Chapters that are NOT preceded by an empty page: 2 (Getting Started), 3 (SILE’s Input Language), 7 (SILE Settings), 9 (Designing Basic Class Files), 10 (Advanced Class Files 1: SILE As An XML Processor)

There should be some consistency in this point. Particularly I find horrendous these empty pages behind the new chapters, perhaps with the exception of the first chapter only because it's preceded by the Table of Contents.

alerque commented 4 years ago

Your first point looks like a problem to me, thanks for reporting.

Your second point has to do with odd/even page numbering. Chapters always begin on odd pages. This is quite typical for printed / bound material because it makes chapters easier to find (in LTR languages). For screen reading this doesn't make much sense, but we are not yet generating different PDFs of the manual optimized for screen vs. print. Since the output of SILE is quite commonly used in print work, I feel the convention is appropriate to use in the manual for now.