Working through the PDF feature requests
: Martin Holmes
Minutes: 140
I did some preparatory work for the font change today; it looks like we’ll be changing Josefin Sans to Alegreya Sans, and Vollkorn to Alegreya Serif, but we still have to make a bunch of decisions about font weight and so on. I also responded to all remaining issues raised by the review team, mostly with comments asking for more detail.
Then I spent a great deal of time experimenting and getting frustrated with the
\nopagebreak command, which doesn’t work at all in most cases, and the
\needspace command, which does, but only (in our case at least) if the
space required is specified in points rather than any other measure. In an effort to
avoid orphaned speech prefixes, I played around until I found that a value of 35pt
works reasonably well for H5 at least, as long as the number of passes through
Xelatex is increased to eight (we were previously using four). We may need to increase these
still further. We’re also considering an easier avoidance of scene-initial headings and
stage-directions being orphaned by throwing in a page-break before; the previous
putative publisher nixed that on the grounds of page-count, but that may be less
of a factor for us now.