I had a look at the PDF and the margins are normal for a magazine, but the font size is what I would consider normal for a book, which means there are too many words per line.
For designers: technical publications should have larger margins than a magazine, to leave room for notes, and smaller margins than a book, to save room for graphics.
The printed book has reasonable margins; there's over an inch of space on both sides of the book. The text is small but to my eyes looks like 12 or 13pt font (caps characters are around 2.5mm high). By way of comparison, the text is around the same as Leslie Lamport's LaTeX book and slightly larger than Donald Knuth's TeX book - though the latter has more dense text as the line spacing is reduced.
So yes, it's a dense book, but it's not particularly unusual for a technical book, and the 1" margin is sufficient for small annotations.
As was The C Programming Language 38+ years ago — at about the same time as troff was rewritten in C. Maybe it would have been appropriate to rewrite troff in Go for this one!
Comments
Page margins are so small!
I had a look at the PDF and the margins are normal for a magazine, but the font size is what I would consider normal for a book, which means there are too many words per line.
For designers: technical publications should have larger margins than a magazine, to leave room for notes, and smaller margins than a book, to save room for graphics.
The printed book has reasonable margins; there's over an inch of space on both sides of the book. The text is small but to my eyes looks like 12 or 13pt font (caps characters are around 2.5mm high). By way of comparison, the text is around the same as Leslie Lamport's LaTeX book and slightly larger than Donald Knuth's TeX book - though the latter has more dense text as the line spacing is reduced.
So yes, it's a dense book, but it's not particularly unusual for a technical book, and the 1" margin is sufficient for small annotations.
As an interesting aside, the article points out that the book was formatted with troff.
As was The C Programming Language 38+ years ago — at about the same time as troff was rewritten in C. Maybe it would have been appropriate to rewrite troff in Go for this one!
And by the same programmer, namely the author.