An excellent suggestion! Many manufacturers already do this, e.g. my Samsung Galaxy Tab comes with a bare piece of "getting started" paper, but on-line there is an excellent 144 page (3.2 MB) "users' manual."
I have owned or now own several pieces of Elecraft hardware, and in no case have I ever refered to the printed manual (either "Assembly" or "Users''"). To me the production of pretty-printed paper manuals is twice a nuisance: (1) it is a waste of paper and manufacturers' process time, and (2) it is an aggravation for me because of the storage problem -- I have manuals of practically every description, size and color, and they just take up shelf space. Storing a manual as a PDF file is a very efficient use of space. My "manuals" folder contains 280 files in 51 sub-folders, and takes up only 226 MB of disk space. Storage is dirt-cheap these days; I chuckle over my first, 5MB, hard drive that was three times the size of my K3, and the "disk packs" I carried around to stick in the "washing machines" that used them. Moreover, once one frees oneself from the rather squinty corporate attitude of Adobe embodied in "Adobe Acrobat" and uses "after-market" PDF editors (some of which are free), one has a quite natural way of incorporating the small "erratum/errata" changes that usually accompany hardware evolution. Take note, Elecraft, and join the wave of the twentieth century! John Ragle -- W1ZI ===== On 8/21/2011 4:14 AM, Alastair Couper wrote: > I would like to suggest that the good folks at Elecraft consider making > paper manuals an optional item at check out time. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
