Re: [OT] A short (less than a minute), informal survey about LaTeX

[Stefan Nobis <stefan-ml@snobis.de>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:

> 1. Did you know about the savetrees package by Scott Pakin

Yes.

> 2. Would you find it useful when producing PDF files other that
> scientific articles (using Org-mode or not)?

No. I use org-mode mostly for documentation and even documentation
should look nice (the whitespace in a document is there for a reason;
IIRC in the documentation of koma-script there is some rationale for
the layout).

There are many other ways to influence the layout and save
whitespace on paper. Personally, I use the koma-script classes and
playing with parameters like DIV IMHO give more appealing results. For
controlling the body there are also quite some good packages (like
enumitem), that allow more fine grained control.

With a simple "#+LATEX_HEADER_EXTRA: \usepackage[extreme]{savetrees}"
it's very easy to get this special effect. But maybe we should make
this easier with a special option like "uglyandcompressed:t" (pun
intended)?

I'm not against a more compact and cleaned up preamble and maybe a
special orgmode package for LaTeX may be a good idea. But fiddling
with the layout of a document should never be the default and only be
enabled via explicit options, as quite some classes out there do a
really good job.

BTW: If producing PDF for screenreading is important, we should think
about an easy option to switch to A5 with a sane layout. A5 is much
better for screenreading than A4 and even 2 pages A5 printed on a
single A4 looks quite good and readable. The main benefit: With A5
there is much less whitespace (see documentation of koma-script for an
example). Maybe A5 output should be the default setting?

-- 
Until the next mail...,
Stefan.