Re: Online manuals issues when read from mobile devices

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Oct 19, 2021, at 4:27, Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 10:35 PM Carlos Pita <carlosjosepita2@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> when read from a phone, there are some issues with the documentation
>> of emacs, elisp and org-mode that is available online in html format:
>> navigation links, subsection entries and code sections are barely
>> visible and not proportionate to the body font size, which is not only
>> unpleasant to look at but, more importantly, makes it very difficult
>> to read and navigate the manuals from a phone.
>> 
>> Please, see the attached screenshots. They were taken using a pretty
>> standard Android phone running Chrome, everything more or less
>> up-to-date, no weird customizations. Moreover, I've been seeing the
>> same or related problems in other phones over the years too.
> 
> Some earlier discussion of related issues:
> 
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2019-06/msg00000.html
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2020-03/msg00011.html
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2021-02/msg00097.html
> 
> Note that the viewport declaration is now output by texi2any, e.g. see
> at https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/index.html
> I hope that the problem should go away if the manual is regenerated
> with Texinfo 6.8. So as I understand it, there is nothing to be fixed
> in texi2any for this. Please correct me if I am wrong.
> 
> I don't know if it could be fixed with CSS. If it could be, it could
> potentially be fixed without waiting for the Emacs developers or
> others to regenerate the online manual by contacting appropriate
> people responsible for GNU webpages. Does anybody have a proposal?

The viewport declaration is necessary to account for the pixel sizes of those 
small devices.

For the layout itself and the overall text width, @media directives are a nice 
addition. They allow the menu to be turned into a column instead of being a 
broken line as it would be today, etc. I wrote something in the past. It worked 
pretty well but I must have broken it at one point...

-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @brandelune
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/