Message-Id: <199401271406.AA06561@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Thu, 27 Jan 1994 13:38:22 +0000
From: Paul Taylor <pt@DOC.IC.AC.UK>
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Subject:      article."style"
Status: R

William T. Trotter invited us to
> Count me as among those who think it is particularly unattractive
> - independent of any discussion about paper sizes.

Sebastian (I think) made similar comments last week.

It is depressing how many books you see nowadays that have been printed
in more or less the distrubution book.sty.

Looking into the code for article.cls, it seems that the principle that
for efficient reading there should be approximately 65 characters on a line
has been built in.

I grant you that this is an accepted principle of book design, though
my feeling is that when technical material dominates text the considerations
change.  However we seem to have a consensus that any claim that the
standard LaTeX styles are good design is simply laughable.

This is one of many differences between compatibility and native mode
which will upset users and make them less likely to change over.
(I have only been able to run LaTeX2e in compatibility mode because
there is too wide a gulf between native mode and existing macro packages.)

Now that the paper size is to be declared to LaTeX, I suggest that
the default text area should be as large as will reasonably fit on
the page (maybe on the overlap of A4 and American so-called "letter" size).

Then we'll be doing our bit for the world's forests by halving the paper
consumption of LaTeX.

Paul

PS From the point of view of the "design" implicit in the standard
styles, the principle that they should look as horrible as possible seems
not so unreasonable. Then people will be forced to think about design.