[gentoo-user] Re: ridiculously wide handbook pages

[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-10-01, Renat Golubchyk <ragermany@×××.net> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:13:24 +0000 (UTC) Grant Edwards
><grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
>
>> I've noticed recently that the Gentoo handbook web pages are
>> ridiculously wide. (It seems to me that they didn't used to be, but I
>> wouldn't swear to that).

Actually I think what's happened is that for some reason I have a much
larger average width difference between the proportional font and the
fixed font that I used to.

> As fas as I can remember they've always been that wide. Anyway, since
> Gentoo uses [1] GuideXML [2] for their documentation which gets
> transformed into HTML you won't be able to provide a fix if you don't
> know what XSLT rules the converter uses for transformation.
>
> Unfortunately Gentoo documentation uses table layout instead of
> relying entirely on CSS.

Yup, I was looking through the page source, and it didn't look like
they were using CSS.  I was pretty skeptical of CSS when it first
started showing up, but I think I'm now a convert.  It allows you do
do things in a much more "LaTeX" like manner: when you're writing all
you do is define what something is rather than how it's layed out.
[Which is how HTML was indended to be used 15 years ago, but it rather
quickly degenerated into the worlds crappiest page layout language
which depended utterly on the assumption that everybody on the planet
has the same size/resolution display and same OS/browser/version
display as the page's author.]

> Therefore it is not easy to make the docs beautiful for everybody
> right now. But there is a simple workaround which you may find good
> enough. Add the following CSS rule into your ~/.mozilla/<...your
> profile...>/chrome/userContent.css or install the Stylish add-on [3]
> and create a style with the rule:
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
>
> @-moz-document domain("gentoo.org") {
>   td.content p {
>     width: 40em;
>   }
> }
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Change "40em" to anything you like.

Cool!  Now, will I be able to find this bit of info the next time I'm
doing an install...

[It doesn't matter how many browsers I configure now, the next time
I'm doing an install it won't be using one of them.]

-- 
Grant