Re: Contributions to Guile

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> writes:

>>> If the html export was nicely themed
>>
>> It can be nicely themed.  FWIW, Gnulib’s gendocs.sh, which is what most
>> projects use to export their HTML to gnu.org, now includes a CSS by
>> default (see <https://gnu.org/s/guix/manual> as an example.)  We can
>> change this CSS anytime, and in fact, I would love it if someone
>> talented would come up with improvements!
>
> Ok, yeah
>   https://gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Derivations.html#Derivations
> does look a lot nicer!  I think it could look nicer still; eg, Racket's
> docs using Scribble and anything using Sphinx tends to seem more nicely
> themed:
>
>   https://hy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial.html
>   https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/define.html
>
> I think maybe the left-hand bar kind of helps, and some tweaks to the
> coloring might help too.

I would like to note that a while ago I prepared a *very simple* style
sheet for GNU manuals to make it easier for me to read them online:

    https://userstyles.org/styles/108215/gnu-manuals

This works with the “stylish” extension, which is available here:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

I’m not claiming that this is beautiful, but it fixes a couple of things
that I found most annoying about the defaults.  The most obvious changes
are:

  * limited maximum line width
  * list bullets in the frame
  * scaling (the font size changes as the window is resized, but the
    line width stays the same)
  * different colour for navigation header

I kept the changes to a minimum because I hoped they would be
uncontroversial enough to be accepted as an incremental improvement over
the defaults.

Some of the HTML produced by Texinfo isn’t annotated very well, so it’s
hard to find a generic style that works for every manual out there.

I think that http://practicaltypography.com is really pretty and with a
little more tweaking the online manuals could look similarly attractive.

~~ Ricardo