It’s very possible I’m missing a setting somewhere, but it seems to me that Bear 2 now imposes much narrower margins on its exports to PDF or when printing directly.
Comparing a PDF generated from Bear 1 to the same document exported from Bear 2, I get the following rough measurements:
Bear 1
Left/Right Margin: 2.5cm
Avg Characters/line: 89.8
Avg Words / line: 13.4
Bear 2
Left / Right Margin: 1.6cm
Avg Characters/line: 103.6
Avg Words / line: 15.4
To my eyes, the new exports feel claustrophobic and harder to read. It’s especially disappointing in an application that has always put such an emphasis on typography. While it’s probably a bit austere by contemporary standards, I’d note that the upper end of the optimum line length advocated by Robert Bringhurst is 75 characters or around 12 words/line.
From a practical standpoint, I used to generate documents straight from Bear to share with colleagues, but now have to take them into a different program to address this issue.
I imagine there are some technical constraints involved with offering customisable margins, but even a choice between narrow margins and large margins (ie Bear 2 default and Bear 1 default) would be preferable to the current one-size only policy.