Thom LaCosta wrote:
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Jerry Keller (K3BZ) wrote:
There's no reason why this same system cannot be used to maintain an
on-line, downloadable manual....
Not sure how one would do it with Adobe.....unless you had individual
pdf files for each page...which could be yet another nightmare.
Actually, PDF has a way of doing that to the electronic form of the
document, but I'm not aware of seeing it being used in anger and I don't
think the (free) reader has a way of identifying and just printing the
updated pages.
Basically, the key to the contents of a PDF document is at the end of
the file, so you can substitute, add or delete pages, by simply
appending to the file. The mechanism could also update smaller units, or
do a Tipp-Ex (Snopake) job to overwrite a small bit of the text. It even
includes revision numbers for the components.
The real problem is that PDF files are created from revisable form
documents and the typical revisable form document format, e.g. Word, is
not designed for documents which have to maintained like hand typed
paper masters, partly because they were selling themselves on the
abilitty to always create an optimum layout, rather than having to
compromise to minimise updates.
Another factor is marketing, documents with variable length pages and
space reserved on pages for updates, and with sub-page numbers don't
look as good as a document with simple pages numbers and even length
pages, and the reason for the difference is a post-sales one.
--
David Woolley
"The Elecraft list is a forum for the discussion of topics related to
Elecraft products and more general topics related ham radio"
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