At 9:41 pm -0600 11/19/04, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
that the user's manual / on-line documentation, instead of in ~.pdf format, was in HTML. Bane or blessing?
Please ... NO !
My response to this is right out of a 1930s vampire movie: I hold my cross up to the monster, avert my eyes and pray.
PDF manuals, properly done (as the Finale manuals have always been), are simple, elegant and __print_properly__. They are basically books with links inside them.
With HTML every program seems to have a different idea of how to display the source and the printing is __atrocious__. Quite often it's worse than atrocious: It is completely useless; graphics broken across pages are the norm, proper margins are unspecifiable, paragraphs are randomly and ruthlessly split and reformatted -- the list of formatting and usability desecrations is legion.
There is also, apparently, some sort of HTML-induced disease that causes authors to create untold semi-random links that so obfuscate reading the documentation that it is impossible for humans to ever fully access all of the information provided. And which somehow makes it virtually impossible to find anything even remotely useful when searching.
/*
Whoa!
I guess that venting gives some indication of how much I hate and despise HTML documentation of anything but the most trivial... :-)
Regardless, IMNSHO a well designed set of PDF manuals is _always_ going to be a lot more useful than HTML "documentation."
*/
-=-Dennis
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