[DOC-SIG] Library reference SGML plan / size of supplied documentation

[Paul Prescod]

Richard Folwell wrote:
> I agree with this completely.  PDF is atrocious for online viewing, for a
> number of reasons [1].  Overall I prefer Postscript, but PDF has the big
> practical advantage that we can distribute a viewer with it, whereas many
> people are not in a position to view/print Postscript [2].  

Yes, PDF is very seldom appropriate for online display. Theoretically
you can make scrollable PDF, but nobody goes to that effort. 

I should also mention (responding now to Bill) that is is possible to
make card-like HTML that is much more intelligent than a page breaking
algorithm intended for print. It is tricky to know where to make the
page breaks, since we all run at different resolution, but even a naive
algorithm can do better than a print-oriented one.

> For online reading  we install HTML, and this seems to be the best 
> for the moment [3].
> [3] I also like WinHelp, but understand that a few people use systems that
> cannot read it ;-)

Note that WinHelp is being replaced by an HTML variant. Hopefully you
will just have to supply a few specially organized (XML?) index files
and TOC files to turn an ordinary HTML page collection into a winhelp
file. I haven't investigated enough to know for sure.

 Paul Prescod

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