Craig, we're really not that far apart here.
It's prohibitively expensive and adds significant complications for
the manufacturer, who has to maintain revision information per-page.
Maintaining revision information for updated pages is trivial. Adobe
FrameMaker makes this easy even without using XML tags. I won't bore everyone
with inside-baseball details here, but believe me, it's a no-brainer, takes
almost no time, and costs nothing extra. The tools are there. (No, not MS
Word. Anybody who is still trying to use MS Word for large, evolving sets of
complex technical documents either isn't really serious about technical
documentation to begin with, or is, um, alarmingly underinformed. :-)
The solution of offering a downloadable PDF of the manual is simpler
for the manufacturer . . . Users could print the manual if they
wanted, but otherwise I wouldn't have killed as many trees, Al Gore
would be happy, and we'd save $10/unit sold over distributing a
seldom-read manual.
I agree! It does cost less not to publish paper manuals. As a tech writer for
a major Silicon Valley semiconductor company, I put out thousands of pages of
PDF documents a year that are never printed on paper. What I'm saying is not
that manuals necessarily have to be printed on paper by the manufacturer, but
rather that adopting a different documentation paradigm (a) would cost no
more than the current process, and (b) might well be more attractive to many
end users than the current process.
I'm suggesting that it makes sense to structure ham radio manuals more like
military radio manuals, and adopt a similar upgrading scheme. Whether you do
this on paper, on a CD-ROM, as downloadable files, or as a combination of all
of these doesn't really matter. Documentation downloads from the website and
CD-ROMs shipped with the radio would be free, but CD-ROMs ordered separately
from the radio would be charged for, as would any paper documentation (whole
manuals and updates) printed and shipped by the manufacturer. It could be
preprinted and inventoried or, since it doesn't have to be bound, produced
in-house as ordered. The saved cost of binding could be used to cover the
additional cost of edge-reinforced punched stock, if desired.
Most end users who want a paper manual would choose the option of printing it
themselves on ordinary printer paper. If the manuals and updates were designed
as I described in my previous post, they would lend themselves exceptionally
well to home printing and loose-leaf binding. The user wouldn't have to print
out a whole new manual every time there's an update. Those who care to could
keep their manuals up-to-date elegantly and with a minimum of fuss; those who
don't care to would never be bothered.
Bill / W5WVO
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