Simple stuff like margins

[clintolsen]

I searched through the SILE book, and aside from references to it in Lua, I could not find basic commands to control left/right/top/bottom margins. If I missed it, please send me a cluepon. Thanks...

[alerque]

What you're looking for isn't called margins at all. You want to setup a frameset that describes your page layout. This can be a single frame or multiple frames to include headers, footers, columns, etc. The text generally gets placed inside the frameset right up to the edge (with the exception of various skip options), so your overall page layout (what you called left/right/top/bottom margins) is actually configured by setting the edges of your content frame relative to the page size.

You're quite right this could use better documentation so lets keep the issue open to make a more explicit note about this so people searching for these terms will find the right settings.

[StefanSchroeder]

Well,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_(typography)

seems to indicate that it is indeed called margins.

[alerque]

@clintolsen Please review the copy I added to the manual and see if those explanations address your concern. Would searching for "margins" and finding those blurbs have pointed you in the right direction of what tool to reach for?

[simoncozens]

This is all good, but it might be a bit more user friendly to have a package similar to TeX's "geometry" that makes it easy for you to define a page layout without having to do too much Lua. It doesn't really fit with the "document content in XML, layout in Lua" philosophy but, hey, people will want it and it'll end up happening anyway so we may as well do it.

[alerque]

I agree. There are actually a couple of setup things like this that could be bridged with a package. On the other hand this particular instance –at least in my head– also makes some sense as a class option. The class already takes a paper size option, why shouldn't it take some other parameters as well so that values like default page margins aren't hard coded into the class? Each class might have different options depending on the purpose.

Another example is crop marks. SILE currently has this as a package, but I ran into some series downsides to having this configured after the initial class was setup, so in CaSILE I actually rewrote it to be a class option. I realize you can hook into and redo things the class setup, but this has some drawbacks. One of them being other packages that need to know what mode to run it might get initialized incorrectly. Without the equivalent of TeX's preamble that runs before the start of the document some things are a bit awkward to do in packages.

[clintolsen]

I think the text you added is fine. I agree with others that Sile is eventually going to have to support parameters of some kind in order to control some aspects of page layout. I think asking non-techie users to write Lua to do that is a bit of an ask.