Some improvements for the PDF of the manual

[ViralBShah]

• Remove release notes from the PDF (we start with 25 pages of release notes - mostly blank) (Remove NEWS.md from the PDF of the manual #36312)
• The spacing for chapter numbers in the TOC is not sufficient ([LaTexWriter] Better spacing between section number and title JuliaDocs/Documenter.jl#1785)

Nice to have:

• Have a mechanism for a custom cover page ([TeX] Allow custom preamble JuliaDocs/Documenter.jl#1788)

Edit: I updated the title of this issue to cover various issues in the PDF of the manual.

Basically have to go 50 pages to get to the "Getting started" part of the manual, which is chapter 14.

[ViralBShah]

The pdf of the Julia manual opens with a whole section on Release Notes, where each section of our release notes is a chapter in the documentation. This makes the documentation have many chapters in the beginning with just a couple of lines on each page. I suggest that we make all of release notes one chapter, if it is easy to do.

I suspect this happens because in the web version, the next page from the landing page is the release notes. However, in the online docs, one probably uses the toc on the left for navigation.

[mortenpi]

The reason is that the NEWS.md page, while "hidden", is actually the same level as the Home/Manual/Base/etc. chapters, and so it becomes a separate \chapter. It might be possible to make it a lower-level page in the PDF or something along those lines.

[ViralBShah]

I guess showing release notes to someone that early on in even in the web version doesn't seem like a good idea. Perhaps we can include it as a link rather than as a separate page? The level of information in the NEWS file as we currently ship it is significantly more technical than the rest of the manual.

[ViralBShah]

Actually, is it possible to remove the NEWS altogether from the PDF? It is good the way it is in the web version, but doesn't add much value in the pdf.

[ViralBShah]

The TOC has way too much detail. Would be nice to present fewer levels of information in the Table of Contents.

[ViralBShah]

Spacing issues in TOC:

[ViralBShah]

How does one go about fixing the latex generated that finally builds this PDF? Is it something in our Julia code, or some other tool that is harder for us to modify?

[ViralBShah]

Self-answer: https://github.com/JuliaDocs/Documenter.jl/blob/master/src/Writers/LaTeXWriter.jl