[TYPO3] Documentation by TYPO3 with pdf-renderer

[Christopher Torgalson]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 9:41 AM, Dmitry Dulepov [typo3]
<dmitry at typo3.org> wrote:
> virgil huston wrote:
>  > One question. Is there a way to have pages not A4. A4 really messes up US
>  > printers. I have seen cases where printers are "down" for days. Is there a
>  > way to make a choice between A4 and the US letter size in these cases.
>
>  My printer allows me to choose A4 for Letter-formatted documents and prints very well. Not sure why it does not work for you. May be driver issue?


I wondered the same thing. Nevertheless, it's not really important.
What matters here is that since there are different paper sizes in
wide use in the TYPO3 community, we need some way to ensure a standard
way to refer to pages in docs. As far as I can work out, this means we
need at least one of three things in any printable documentation:

1. Automatically generated tables of contents depending on selected paper size
2. Fully independent versions for different paper sizes
3. Page numbers/location indicators *independent of location on the
actual printed page*.

If options (1) or (2) are sufficiently difficult, I personally have no
problem with (3)--it's very common in academic texts to refer to
locations in the text quite unrelated to their physical location in
the text. For example:

Shakespeare: I.i.24 (Act I, Scene i, line 24)
Plato: 123b4 (a certain location and line corresponding to some
canonical edition of Plato)
Kant: 4:400 (volume and page of a canonical edition)

Provided we have a sufficiently fine-grained organization to
documents, something as simple as 7.3.2 (Section 7, subsection 3,
sub-subsection 2) might be workable. Anybody on the lists with
experience in organizing long-ish technical docs who can improve on my
suggestions?

It's also worth recalling that in docs like the TSref, page-number
references are typically completely useless with each new version…


-- 
Christopher Torgalson
http://www.typo3apprentice.com/