michael mcd said:
>   the PDF looks quite good. Offhand, though,
>   the page numbers look like they drop low enough
>   that they _could_ be out of the printable area.

you're right.  so i fixed that.  download it again...
>   http://z-m-l.com/misc/14465-take5.pdf


>   shorter works are poor representatives of the problem

still, you don't need 350 pages to cover the waterfront,
especially when 315 of them have nothing happening...

***

jim said:
>   First time I tried downloading this is didn’t work. Tried
>   it again later from a different computer and it worked.

don't know what to tell you, jim.


>   Tried printing out the first 10 pages. 
>   My printer reported that the document requested C5 page size
>   – but the C series is an envelope size?
>   I would have expected A4 or US “Letter” size.

the pagesize is 5.5*8.5; that's what michael wanted.

eventually, how you will print it out will depend on
what you intend to do with it in terms of _binding_.

for this preview, you have 2 convenient options...

you can print it out 2-up, on letter-size, using the
"layout" method you should find in the print dialog.
for enhanced realism, slice pages down the middle.

or you can print it out on 5.5*8.5, which is available
at most any office-supplies stores, in my experience.

we'll discuss printing and binding more, at a later time.


>   First Page title appears to print off center to the left.

looks pretty dead-on centered to me, at least in the .pdf.
did you print to 5.5*8.5 paper?  if so, it should be right...


>   Contents in an unusually small font

correct...  my preference is for the contents section to be
shown on 1 page, 2 pages max, so i had to cramp the font.

i woulda reworked it manually if i wanted to take the time.

reworking entails moving the chapters to the first page of
each _book_ section, so the contents section up front just
contains the entries relating to the _parts_ and the _books._

it's issues like these that get into the nitty-gritty questions
on how automated you want the whole process to become.

the easiest solution would be to run the table of contents
over to 3 pages, or 4, or whatever it happens to be...  but
that approach doesn't produce a lot of satisfaction for me.

so the question for me is, "how hard is it to automate what
i would _really_ like to do in various situations like these?"

since i was doing this by hand, to get on the same page
with michael, i was willing to do a little manual massage.


>   Page numbers in an unusually large font

the text-editor i used to create this .pdf does it that way,
and as far as i can see, there's no way that i can control it.

but that's not the way my program does it.

so it's not something we really need to worry about...


>   Ragged Right is an unusual convention for a PDF document

michael expressed no preference; ragged-right was easier.


>   Body font seems to be unusually small.

i think so too.  it's 10-point times new roman, i believe.
(yep, that's it, checked.)  but michael has the young eyes.

what i was doing, in case it wasn't totally clear to people,
was retaining the existing linebreaks from the p.g. e-text.

in order to get (reasonable) half-inch margins on each side,
i had to reduce point-size down to what _i_ feel is too small.
...but i wasn't doing this for me; i was doing it for michael...


>   Line length of approx 70 chars seems unusually long for a
>   book-like format.  Most books use about 50 chars per line
>   of text because doing so makes the book more readable.

so you didn't notice that i was using the existing p.g. linebreaks.

there were several tip-offs.  first and foremost, the first line of
each paragraph is too long, because of the indent i introduced.

second, the lines are more ragged than they should be, because
line-length decisions are made on a monospace character count,
not on a metric based on the line's proportionally-spaced width.
(_any_ proportionally-spaced metric is better than monospacing,
since the proportions are highly correlated across various fonts.)

and thirdly, like i said, and you said, the line-lengths are too long.

-bowerbird