Subject: FAQ page margin width issue
From: Brian Dessent <[email-masked]>
To: Cygwin mailing list <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 09:31:09 -0700

On cygwin.com, there are two versions of the FAQ page.  The first is
<http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html> and is the direct output of texi2html.
The second is <http://cygwin.com/faq/faq0.html> which is the same
content except the texi2html output is in a TABLE, with the standard
Cygwin.com navbar on the left (also a TABLE, with the width="20%"
attribute.)

I don't know about you all but I find this second "faq0.html" version
nearly useless because there is (at least) one question that has a very
wide "program output" inside a PRE block tag.  This causes the margin
width to be about twice the width of my screen.  In the 'faq.html'
version that doesn't use tables, this is not a problem since the browser
renders the page sanely, i.e. everything -except- the one wide line is
wrapped to the actual screen width, but there is still a horizontal
scroll bar as that one section is wider than the rest.

However, when this content is included in a table cell as is the case
with 'faq0.html', it becomes very unfriendly, since that one table cell
must expand its width to fit the widest element.  In this case the
margins for the entire cell are adjusted to fit this one wide line,
which means that you have to scroll horizontally to read -any- answer
longer than a sentence or two.  I can't possibly see how anyone could
use this page in this format and not be highly annoyed, unless they have
a >= 1600px width screen and/or small fonts.

The part of the FAQ that causes this is:

-----
Why doesn't man (or apropos) work?

Even after installing the `man' package, you get an error like this:

	bash-2.04$ man man
	Error executing formatting or display command.
	System command (cd /usr/man ; (echo -e ".pl 1100i"; cat
/usr/man/man1/man.1; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/tbl |
/usr/bin/groff -Tascii -mandoc | less -is) exited with status 32512.
	No manual entry for man
-----

Possible work-arounds:

- Add hard line breaks to the source file
winsup/doc/how-using.texinfo:185.  This is the easiest fix.

- Add "<style>pre { white-space: normal; }</style>" to the faq0.html
file somewhere.  This causes blocks of text inside PRE tags to wrap on
whitespace.  Unfortunately, Internet Exploder doesn't do this right so
this isn't a viable solution for 90%+ of the web.

- Don't link to faq0.html by default.  You get sent to faq0.html if you
follow that path: cygwin home page -> FAQ link on left column -> "FAQ as
one big HTML file".  At the second step in that path you're in a
frameset, and clicking the "one big file" link leaves the frameset and
opens this cruddy faq0.html.  I don't see why instead you couldn't just
link to cygwin.com/faq/faq.html and stay inside the frameset (thus
keeping the nav links down the left.)

- Find some other way to convince IE to not page-widen.  Good luck. 
I've tried everything and I can't force it to work, other than
specifying in pixels the width to the TD element that contains the
offending bits.  That's obviously bogus.

Brian

(I'm now convinced you guys are all so uber-'l33t that you never look at
the FAQ anymore, otherwise I don't see how anyone could possibly put up
with having to scroll horizontally back+forth to read each line.   :-) )

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