Re: [help-texinfo] changing font size in hardcopy

[Laurence Finston]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005, Karl Berry wrote:

>
>     It may be necessary to use `true' units,
>
> Indeed (which does not seem easy, offhand) ...

What's the difficulty?  After I wrote, I remembered that
I used to do this when I was testing something with
various degrees of magnification.

>
> Matthias, I'm not sure why it had such a drastic effect on the layout,
> unless it's all related to the different \hsize, which doesn't entirely
> make sense to me.  Anyway, it seems the answer is, "no easy way to get
> bigger fonts".  Sorry.

I think it should work, too.  This will probably be too late to
help Matthias, but when I get a chance, I'll try to get it to
work for me.

>
> P.S. The non-easy way is to change this code in texinfo.tex.  E.g.,
> change and 11pt to 12pt (doesn't really matter), and \magstephalf to
> \magstep1.  There are better methods, but none I can give a recipe for
> off the top of my head.

I think this a better solution.  Any method will ultimately
just change the fonts accessed by the `\font' assignments
(or commands, or whatever they are), so I
don't see anything wrong with the method you describe.
Of course, like everything else, it could be refined.

I think it would be worth implementing a way of increasing the
font sizes for the sake of accessibility for the visually impaired.
A related issue is the size of graphics in the HTML output:  While
the text is scalable in a browser, PNG graphics aren't.  When I work
on my manual again, I'll try to figure something out.  Obviously,
I can't make the PNGs scalable, but it should be possible to generate
them in different sizes and load the correct size based on the value of
conditionals in the Texinfo files.

Laurence