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Dan Roberts wrote:
>
> actually, in certain circumstances, yes. As a visually impaired reader, ...
> With print/pdf I just have to take what you set, but with HTML,
> I want it the way I need it.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brierley, Sean <Sean -at- Quodata -dot- Com>
>
> >> From: Sandy Harris [SMTP:sandy -at- storm -dot- ca]
> >> I want things like page size, font choice, etc.
> >> to be under the control of the user, the application or the stylesheet. I
> >> think
> >> having the writer control those, beyond setting reasonable defaults, is a
> >> serious error.
> >>
> >But, why would you want this?
Visually impaired readers may need larger fonts or different colours.
One customer may have a 21" monitor and be reading your doc in a full-screen
window. Another may have a smaller monitor and have many other windows open
when he needs your doc. They need different layouts.
So do the European printing on A4 and the American printing on US standard
size paper, though in this case you can easily do one format that is OK for
either.
I once watched in horror as weeks of writer time were used to convert a
set of Frame docs from the 8.5 * 11 pages the developers had used to a
smaller page size, to match a customer's corporate standard. There were
quite a lot of docs, several manuals of several 100 pages each, and they
were badly formatted, in particular they had hard page breaks all over
the place.
My contention is that allowing writers to insert hard page breaks is a
defect in a text processing system. If the formatter cannot produce good
output (on whatever paper size the style sheet specifies) without those,
then build a better formatter.
There's a bunch of things I can legitmately change if I quote you. I can
alter fonts (but not italic vs. normal), line breaks, page breaks, paper
size, ... Other things I cannot alter. Wording, paragraph breaks, skipping
text without indicating the ellipsis, ...
I would contend that anything I can change when I quote you should be
under the control of style sheets, never embedded in the document text.
> Surely, in days of old,
> >printed documentation prevented readers from having these controls. And, do
> >you not format pages and choose fonts and create stylesheets to deliberately
> >maximize readability? Does giving up control of these items serve to reduce
> >your effectiveness and reduce the utility and readability of your document?
> >
> >for the majority, is
> >it useful to give up these controls to the reader?
>
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