Re: facing pages in PDF browsers

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Heiko,
I attached you to the CC of this mail because 


On 2013-06-23 at 20:47:46 GMT, Karl Berry wrote:

 > Reinhard,
 > 
 > Finally getting back to your proposed texinfo.tex change.
 > 
 >     this change some browsers display two pages by default though they
 >     didn't in the past, 
 > 
 > I rather suspect people will be very unhappy about that.  I know I
 > would be, if my PDF reader happened to care about it.

Hi Karl,
from what you say I deduce that you don't use Adobe Reader, at least
not frequently.

You rarely get what you want by default.  Consider the documentation
provided by Heiko.  He's using threads and thus only the text area is
displayed by default without any margins.  This is fine for mobile
devices and I'm convinced that visually impaired are very grateful,
though not everybody prefers it.  The LuaTeX manual is using
/PageLayout/TwoPageRight too, but it also instructs AR not to use the
full screen.  I'm baffled that this is possible at all.  And there are
many documents which instruct AR to start in "continous page mode".

Thus, if you're only concerned about Adobe Reader, IMO there is no
need to be worried.  I thought a lot about these things since I
suggested /PageLayout/TwoPageRight and came to the conclusion that
there is nothing an AR user is or can be accustomed to.  However, one
can at least select the preferred representation with a single mouse
click.  But there seems to be no way to switch to /TwoPageRight or to
threads.  These features are only available if they are set in the PDF
file.

AR assigns a higher priority to variables set in the PDF file rather
than to those set in the config file.  This has some advantages too,
it's quite nice if a presentation or slide show starts in fullscreen
mode.  However, there are some design flaws in AR.  It's possible to
exchange left and right pages (needed for Arabic and Hebrew).  This
has no impact on how the pages are displayed when a file is loaded, it
only makes a difference when two pages are displayed at the same time.
Unfortunately we can't use this option because it determines the page
order when the document is printed.  But it's certainly a design flaw
or even a bug that AR doesn't treat /TwoPageRight similarly.

 >     the patch below might be better.  
 > 
 > Unfortunately, making the change in \HEADINGSdouble wouldn't help
 > much in this regard, since @setchapternewpage odd is set in most
 > manuals.

Sure, but "@setchapternewpage odd" makes only sense for two-page
layouts.  In this case /PageLayout/TwoPageRight is appropriate.
If one-page-mode is preferred, it has to be stated in the texinfo
config file anyway because otherwise you get unnecessary blank pages
when you send the PDF file to a printer.
     
 >     The basic idea is that /TwoPageRight is *only* needed if page
 >     numbers appear at different positions on odd and even pages.
 > 
 > Granted that viewing
 >   [1][2]
 >   [3][4]
 > is bad ... is it possible to make the default for Adobe also be
 > one-page mode?  That is, if a user says "view in two page mode",
 > then we want the /PageLayout/TwoPageRight so they get the right
 > thing.  But if they don't say that, then we want one page mode to
 > be the default (as it always has been, I gather, from your
 > description).

Unless I overlooked something, I fear that there is no way to override
settings in PDF files in the "preferences" menu.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:address@hidden
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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