BTW. You’ll all get a mention in the book. Thank You very much for your thoughts and ideas. Very helpful.
Folks: This is all very helpful. I really appreciate the screen shots by @Thanatomanic which really explain your ideas. A picture is worth a million words.
I will not fuss about the user experience on a phone or paper. The tablet/laptop/computer experience is the target.
I’ve increased the text to 18px, and the code snippets to 15.5. The lines are shorter and easier to read. When I mention an API, I use bold Helvetica/sans. It’s less effort to digest. I’m going to keep the Palatino as I much prefer a serif font for body text. I think this look nice on-line and on the tablet.
Having pumped up the text, I only get about 40 lines of code snippets per A4 page. I can get that back to 60 using my fake 275x389mm page and get the macOS print system to scale it to A4. So I think that will print nicely. I intend to get it printed on B5 which is about 250x180mm (10"x7").
The text in the drawings looks small compared with the body and code snippets. I’m not sure what to do about that. Suggestions welcome. I’ll update the on-line PDF and html later today.
You can understand my surprise at this discussion. I thought I had dealt with the publishing challenges. I’ve had no feedback about the content of the book, however those bug reports will arrive later!
“Best” font, font size, line spacing, column width?
They all interact. Here is a tool to show what happens when you alter the parameters:
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
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I’m not sure that I’ve understood what GRT is telling me. I know about the Golden Ratio - it’s something like 1.59 and very important in Architecture. When things are subdivided that way, they look right.
I’ve reluctantly decided to drop the Palatino to make the Table of Contents look better. I don’t like body text in sans-serif (Helvetica, Arial etc…), however I’ll use it. The text lines are too long. Usually about 100 bytes per line. If I make the screen font bigger, the print will be huge. Can’t change one thing without disturbing everything else.
Why don’t we shift focus to the actual text.
Folks
I’ve spent most of today on this matter and concluded that I am in an ambush. We’re discussing how to convert markdown into PDF and now we’re in the in the land of typography. HTML version looks fine on my tablet and computers. The PDF has long lines and short paragraphs. Only a few copies of the book will ever exist on paper and I will pick up the bill to pay for printing.
The purpose of the book is to enable me to retire. I have written a simplified version of Exiv2 in 1500 lines of C++ to make it as painless as possible for somebody to learn quickly how Exiv2 works. I hope somebody will maintain Exiv2 in future, or (even better) write a nice new/clean metadata library.
I released the current text to coincide with shipping Exiv2 v0.27.3 to spec and on schedule on 2020-06-30.
There are about 14 undocumented image formats in the book and about 20 sub-sections with the text “To be written.”. It’s my task to complete the substance of the book. And it’s a distraction to discuss how to create the best possible PDF. I have found and documented a method. If somebody would like to polish and improve that method, or work on another method, I will not oppose them. However my aim is to complete the book and retire.
Thank You to everybody who has contributed to this discussion. Your enthusiasm and helpful suggestions are appreciated.
@paperdigits Can you lock this discussion, or at least check “unfollow” so that I can focus on my project to document Exiv2 and retire.
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Apologies for being so pedantic. There is always reader mode. 
(Oh no, it starts at section 8…)
Good luck!
Reader mode? That’s a browser thing, right? You know Perl’s TimWoody - There’s more than one way to do it! My version is Twittie: “there always another way that doesn’t work!”
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Lockee at the request of the original poster.