Suggestion For New Binding Offset Feature

[Adrienne Thompson]

I wish to make a suggestion for a new Texinfo feature. Over the last few days I
had the opportunity to use Texinfo for the first time. I needed to print Paul
Graham's "On Lisp" and have the book bound. I decided to print from the .texi
source file (instead of the pdf file available from Graham's website) on letter
size paper. The Texinfo manual indicated that the command "@setchapternewpage
odd" is used to start new chapters on odd-numbered pages, and to typeset for
double-sided printing - the format used for books, manuals and so on.

Initially, I presumed that "@setchapternewpage odd" would have supplied a
non-zero binding offset by default, in light of its use for bound books. I was
therefore surprised to discover that I had to myself set this feature either by
setting the global bindingoffset variable in the .texi file via the @tex 
address@hidden
tex commands, or by hardwiring the binding offset by writing a new definition in
the texinfo.tex file.

I think it would be useful to have "@setchapternewpage odd" work with an
optional parameter that would set a binding offset. The user could then just
insert a line in the .texi header  "@setchapternewpage odd bindingoffset "  that
would do the required formatting. The optional parameter would be user-definable
and would have a non-zero default value if no value were specified.