[gentoo-user] Re: ridiculously wide handbook pages

[Jörg Schaible]

Hi Edward,

Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2010-09-30, Darren Kirby <bulliver@×××××.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Grant Edwards
>><grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
>>
>>>> Do you have some custom css stylesheets that override the default or
>>>> something?
>>>
>>> Nope. Not that I know of. I presume I'd have to do something I'd
>>> likely remember
>>
>> Yes, you would definitely remember if you did it...
>>
>> Anyway, I think perhaps we must be running considerably different
>> resolutions and text sizes...
>
> I'm pretty sure you're right. I'm apparently seeing a significantly
> larger "fixed" font than you are (as a percentage of screen width).
> For whatever reason, a lot of sites like to use a low-contrast color
> scheme for things like listing blocks.  For example, Gentoos uses
> medium-blue on light-blue (violet?).  I find that hard to read when
> the font gets too small.
>
>> playing around here a bit more and you are correct, the text will
>> only reformat to the width of the longest code block before the
>> horizontal scroll appears. On the "Creating a Cross-Compiler" page
>> you linked to the longest code block is still only half the width of
>> my screen, so it's not really a problem on my system.
>
> I could reduce the minimum size of my "fixed" font, but that only
> helps until the next web page comes along with an even wider code
> block.

Try a different fixed font. At the end I've chosen "Monotype", because it 
seems to have the narrowest well-readable letters.

> The basic problem is that the width of the normal text paragraphs is
> dependent on the width of the code blocks.  IMO, that's not right[1],
> but whether or not it can be fixed depends somewhat on the document
> formatting system in use.
>
> [1] As somebody who's been using TeX/LaTeX for 25 years, I'm probably
>     inordinately picky about typesetting issues.

- Jörg