irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6book/today | source: github.com/perl6/book/
Set by moderator on 8 June 2010.
01:48 vapace joined 02:06 eternaleye joined 06:31 eternaleye joined
PerlJam is in favor of a way to build the book for either a4 or letter sized paper. 06:37
lucs PerlJam: I can send a patch for that. 06:43
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lucs Um, a4 vs letter, with their different default margin settings, will cause different page breaks, and thus different page numbering between the versions. 21:08
I'll try to propose something that does not have that problem.
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pronik ugh 23:22
sometimes I really hate LaTeX
lucs Who doesn't? ;) 23:23
pronik so, a question to those still awake: would you rather have line wrap and syntax highlighting in the code examples in the book or unicode characters and code highlighting via B<> etc? 23:24
lucs Problems building the book?
pronik I actually like LaTeX, especially for what it can do being like 30 years old
but it struggles with "modern" stuff
lucs I have a love/hate relationship with it.
I love what it can do, but I hate how much trouble I have to go to to figure out how to do it. 23:25
pronik exactly
nowadays, I almost always go with PrinceXML for generated publishing
but there is no OSS alternative to it :(
lucs Oh :/ 23:26
pronik anyway, would you like to look at something?
lucs Er, I guess.
pronik rassie.org/book.pdf
I'm trying to put some lipstick onto the book
lucs Oh, nice. 23:27
pronik however, if you look at the exercise in the "Basics" chapter, you'll notice some latex markup
which sucks, since it's not possible to get it to execute cleanly inside a code environment
lucs On which page does the problem occur? 23:28
pronik however, an alternative which would in fact allow such highlighting lacks syntax highlighting and line wrap
page 16 for example
lucs Oh, I see :(
pronik on the more positive side, look at page 10 line 24 in the top example 23:29
lucs Right, that's nice.
pronik Somehow, I wouldn't want to lose syntax HL, but on the other hand, marking certain code parts to show what has changed is really nifty too 23:30
and we can't have both :(
any thoughts on this? 23:31
lucs Not really, sorry. 23:32
FWIW, I'm playing with book-to-latex to be able to build for 'letter' paper in addition to 'a4'.
Maybe we should combine our efforts.
pronik probably
lucs The a4/letter problem is to ensure that page breaks occur at the same place.
pronik is that at all possible considering different sizes? 23:33
lucs I'm pretty sure it's possible, by forcing proper margins.
I should know pretty soon.
pronik should be possible, if your page area is the same 23:35
but I'm not sure whether margin ratios are fine then 23:36
lucs By default, they're not the same, but I believe they can be forced.
(they == page areas)
pronik yeah, but if we assume you had perfect margin ratio (golden cut) with a4, can you get a golden cut with letter AND the same printing area dimensions? 23:37
lucs I don't think so. 23:38
My idea is to find dimensions that can fit in both sizes and go with that.
pronik so one size will look shitty and the other won't :) 23:39
lucs No, no.
They'll both look shitty :)
Anyway, I'll let you know when I've got something I think is reasonable. 23:40
pronik thanks
and I think I'll try prince for the book
lucs You can generate it from the POD with that?
pronik from HTML 23:41
lucs Ah, okay.
pronik using advanced CSS3
I've done some documentation for work with prince -- I could implement every single bit of Corporate Identity style and it looked really good
lucs (good tools)++ 23:42
(not open source)+-
pronik (open source community not caring about good typography)-- 23:43
you get same bullshit everywhere -- from debian to php
lucs Apart from the TeX crowd, eh.
pronik (tex crowd not caring about Unicode)-- 23:44
I remember trying to get Debian's documentation to generate from docbook to PDFs in different languages
Greek and CJK broke my neck there
lucs :(
UTF-8 support wasn't sufficient? 23:45
pronik no, since Greek TeX is a biest requiring you to type latin and converts in on-the-fly to greek letters 23:46
lucs Yuck.
pronik and CJK requires you to actually switch languages with \\language{Chinese} because of the completely different typography
lucs Oh, I see. Bleah.
pronik you probably can figure out how easy it is to include such language switching in the generated source
I actually like the concept, it's just not the right one for generated sources 23:47
TeX needs a "Modern Perl" revolution :)
lucs Doesn't look like that's gonna happen. 23:48
Gotta go eat; talk to you later. 23:49