GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 669079
The margins on the PDF manual are much too wide
Last modified: 2012-02-25 21:17:31 UTC
The margins on the PDF manual are unnecessarily wide. Over 40% of the width of the page is used up by the left and right margins, which is perhaps double what is necessary. This means that viewing in many PDF viewers wastes screen space, and if you view one page for the height of most screens then the text will be illegible. And, if you print the manual you'll waste even more paper than normal. Cutting the margins by 30% would make the manual more useable without sacrificing print appearance. Cutting by even more would make it even more useable on-screen, but start to look ugly on a printed page (which doesn't seem important to me, but I thought I'd mention it). I, personally, wouldn't mind cutting the margins by a factor of four, but a visual designer might gag at the results.
It is the default a4 paper layout that comes with LaTeX. I'll start using the geometry package so I can specify the size of the margins manually. 2,5 cm (1 inch) seems like an accepted minimum for the margins.
(Thanks for the Imperial-unit-compatible explanation.) I would suggest even smaller margins, as this document will be viewed on the screen 100+ times for every time it is printed (it's probably more like 1000+ times). Examples of documents that I feel have good margins: <http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default/files/uploadedFiles/FIRST_Tech_Challenge/Bowled-Over-Game-Manua_Rev%284%29.pdf> <http://www.toshiba.ca/web/pdf/32_37CV510U_EN.pdf> <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.3305v1>
This bug was previously marked ASSIGNED, which means it should be fixed in doxygen version 1.8.0. Please verify if this is indeed the case. Reopen the bug if you think it is not fixed and please include any additional information that you think can be relevant.
I downloaded and viewed version 1.8.0 of the PDF manual, found at <ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/dimitri/doxygen_manual-1.8.0.pdf.zip>. Looks great to me: thanks.