Re: @smallbook and friends

[Karl Berry]

  OK.  How about this?  @smallbook redefines @foo to use the small
  fonts, and @smallfoo to use smaller fonts.  

I've been thinking about this some more over the past couple weeks, and
I admit I don't yet entirely see the logic.

As things stand, we have:
               normal font  @example  @smallexample
letter            10pt        10pt        9pt
@smallbook        10pt        10pt        9pt

As I understand it, you are proposing:
@smallbook        10pt         9pt        8pt

The change would have the advantage that 80char @smallexamples will fit.
But it has the disadvantages that (a) all the existing @example's,
carefully written to work with @smallbook, will needlessly be in a
smaller font; and (b) the @example's in @smallbook will be smaller
than the main text, unlike in letter.  That seems quite undesirable to me.

Also, I don't agree that there is any implicit assumption about
typesetting in letter because of these font size choices.  Certainly,
fewer characters fit in @smallbook than letter.  That is a physical
fact, and if someone wants their manual to look good in both formats,
then they better constrain their examples to be pretty short.

Also, I don't see anything especially magical about @smallbook.
For example, in @a5, only 77 characters would fit with cmtt8.  Should we
therefore use yet a smaller font size for that paper size?

Finally, I don't see anything especially magical about any of these
numbers.  When we start allowing font changes, people will use courier,
and far fewer characters will fit at the same point size.  (Hmm, that
points out a different problem, which is that people will want to use
times/helvetica/courier, and 10pt times, 10pt helvetica and 10pt courier
are not at all the same nominal size, and so we really should allow for
changing the text size per font family, etc.  Anyway ...)

I recognize that allowing 80 char examples would be useful.  At one
point, Stephen speculated about a @tinyexample command.  We could do
that, using 8pt fonts, and then there would be a way to have such long
examples -- in @smallbook, and with cmtt, anyway.  Of course they'll be
smaller than they need to be in letter, just as most @smallexamples are now.

What do you all think?

k