Re: [doc] DITA files PDF output

Jean T. Anderson wrote:

> scott hutinger wrote:
>
> > ...
> > One question I haven't asked about pdf output.  What is the default 
> > output in terms of fonts/styles etc for docs?  Does IBM have a 
> > standard they use, or is it related to something else?  I'm certain 
> > that some type of output specs exist that have been found to create 
> > good output.  I haven't looked around for this information, as I 
> > think it would take a while to find good information on this.  I 
> > would guess that we might need to find font(s) that everyone can 
> > build the docs with.
> > <snip />
>
>
> What do the users want?
> Do folks want to download the DITAs and build PDFs themselves?
> Or download the built PDFs?
Good question.  I think if it looks good to them, then they wouldn't 
download the docs to build.  In the past I always shunned away from doc 
building and just wanted to see the final output.  Although that was 
back a few years before some of this cooler stuff was around.

Also, don't forget the includes are OS dependant \ != /  or a \ does not 
work when a / is wanted.  So unless some other option I don't know about 
exists, then a / and \ version would need to be downloaded.  I would 
think this issue would have caused enough problems that some flag exists 
to fix this.

A note about fonts.  I have tried looking at the output getstart.pdf on 
a coupld different machines and os's.  It seems on all but one machine, 
helvetica was replaced by Arial of some type.  This is a bit confusing, 
as the fop site seems to say that helvetica is the base font that 
everything has.  I'll have to look on a OS X machine that was displaying 
some other docs I transformed yestereday (not dita) and replaced 
helvitica with Arial; it looked really bad.

> I'm going to hazard a guess that a few might want to download and 
> build themselves and most will want to download the already built PDF, 
> but I could be wrong. We need feedback from the community.
>
> DERBY-79 (http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-79) might be a 
> good starting point for tracking requirements as they get nailed down. 
> It doesn't specify fonts/styles ... at least not yet!
Thanks for bring that up.  You might want to have this on the website 
(DERBY-79) so others can input without the need to search.

> I'm not quite sure how the best way to handle this is. Should we post 
> a "[doc] What do you want the PDF format for manuals to be?" to 
> derby-dev? or to derby-user? then report results back to derby-dev? or 
> record results in DERBY-79?
A good idea, but I think the font issues need to be investigated a bit.  
I'll try to get some more information on the helvetica replacement.  
Although on all but one machine, the output looked good with the font 
replacement.

scott

> I'm not trying to overly complicate it. I'm just wondering what the 
> best way is to hear from the most users in the community.
>
> -jean