Index talk:Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet (1879).djvu

previously uploaded file is here: Index:Narratives of the mission of George Bogle to Tibet.djvu

Dot leaders

@Tar-ba-gan: I've removed the {{x-smaller}} and {{nobr}} templates you used around the symbol parameter ("..") in the {{dtpl}} for the table of contents because the result was breaking on transclusion. By removing these templates the resulting HTML output shrunk from 1 470 300 bytes to 617 280 bytes (i.e. from ~1.5MB to ~600kB), or almost shrunk to a third. 1.5MB. For just the TOC! The reasons are somewhat esoteric, but the short form rule of thumb is: don't do that.

I also really really strongly recommend against trying to reproduce dot leaders at all. There is no support for dot leaders in web standards (or web browsers), so all our templates that purport to generate them are really quite horrid hacks that tend to cause exactly this kind of problem. And while I do think dot leaders are pretty, there really is no need to try to reproduce the original formatting at this level of detail. Printed books are a very different medium and we change much more fundamental things than dot leaders (or the size of each individual dot for crying out loud!). My advice is to spend your energies on reproducing the actual text as precisely as possible, and the formatting only as much as is needed to roughly approximate the original. It's nice if we can match the original in some aspect, but the second it takes too much time, makes the code too complicated, or causes problems elsewhere it should be abandoned in favour of a "good enough" approximation. Xover (talk) 20:18, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

@Xover: Got it! Thanks for taking trouble to deliver such an elaborate explanation! --Tar-ba-gan (talk) 14:14, 24 September 2022 (UTC)