Re: using @titleplage in every format

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 08:15:34PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 10:59:37AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > > Thinking about this again, if @titlepage were to be used for all
> > > formats, it should be purged of all presentational or non-semantic
> > > content. The @page, @vskip and @sp commands there are specific to TeX.
> > 
> > Actually, in my experiments, the titlepage formatted like that looks
> > pretty good in HTML, in an old-fashionned way, and somehow similar to 
> > the TeX counterpart.
> 
> Can you send an example output file?  It not the default at the
> moment and may not be what the users expect.  I doubt that we should
> be imitating the style of the printed page in an electronic format
> such as HTML.

An example:

http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/

It was the default for texi2html and in my opinion it looked better than
the manuals produced by makeinfo which have nothing of the like.

> > I think that it would be better to have only one @titlepage for every
> > format, which would not prevent from using @if* in it.  It does not
> > prevent from using something like @documentinfo and @insertdocumentinfo
> > or something like that to be able to set independently the meta data and
> > format the @titlepage, but to me that's a different issue.
> 
> @titlepage could be an optional command to allow laying out the first 
> couple of pages for printed output.  If @titlepage is not given but 
> @documentinfo (or whatever it is called) is, this could be generated 
> automatically without the @sp, @vskip etc. appearing in the Texinfo 
> source.

It seems to me that in general, even an explicit formatting with @sp and
@vskip would be ok in different formats.  Of course it won't be exactly
the same, for instance @vskip is ignored in genearl, while @sp can be 
rendered in most formats.  But still, it seems to me that in the default
case the same formatting could be used.  Of course, if the manual
authors are not satisfied with the result, they could tweak the results
for the different formats with conditionals, but nevertheless, it seems
to me that using the same @titlepage with the same formatting in every
format is the best default.

> However, I don't know where information about the publisher, ISBN 
> numbers and cover art credits should go in the Texinfo document.  Maybe 
> if somebody actually was printing a proper book they would use 
> @titlepage after all.

To me keeping @titlepage, but using it in the default case in all the
formats benefitting from a title page, which includes in my opinion html
and Info would be the best.  The conditionals could still be used to do
things differently based on the output, typically the ISBN numbers and
cover art credits could be in @iftex @iflatex conditionals.

-- 
Pat