[Lazarus] Lazarus handbook environment proposal

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sat, 23 May 2020, Salvatore Coppola via lazarus wrote:

> Goodmorning people,
> some of us are waiting in presale for the Lazarus Handbook. I've read from
> Detlef that will be printed soon. I've seen on Blaisepascal site that
> will'be distributed both paper and pdf. Btw there are about 1600 pages and
> many are analytic index so, for actual knowledgew of peoples at nowdays,
> analytics index is useless (specially if we have th pdf), so the proposal
> for the Editor (Blaisepascal) is, if we are in time, strip from the the
> handbook this pages, the handbook will remain excellent as well and a tree
> will thank. What do you thinks

The previews you got till now were test versions. In particular the index was
auto-generated which of course resulted in an unusable large index.

We realized the book was to big, so we have recently done some efforts to reduce the paper usage:
- Reduce use of different fonts, use 10 pt instead of 11pt.
- Remove borders around images.
- The index will be hand-crafted to a more reasonable size.
This reduces the amount of pages drastically, so the final book 
will definitely not be 1600 pages.

The work is not done yet, so we don't know the actual outcome, but based on
some reworked chapters, we suspect it will be more like 900 to 1000 pages.

Michael.