[Elecraft] "Exciting" manual to match "exciting" K3

[Tom Childers, N5GE]

On Sun, 09 Mar 2008 10:27:52 +0000, David Woolley wrote:

>Tom Childers, N5GE wrote:
>> On Sat, 8 Mar 2008 20:43:39 -0700, K3KO wrote:
>
>> My experience is that using Acrobat for documentation is a waste of time,
>> especially if the text will ever need to be edited.
>
>PDF is described as a "final form" document language.  That means that 
>it tries to accurately represent the printed page, but is not editable 
>(beyond replacing or adding whole pages).  Conventional printed 
>documents are also final form; PDF is a replacement for printed documents.
>
[snip]

Agree.  Thanks for the enlightening explanation of "final form".


>> 
>> I worked for a national car loan company that had to keep up with the car loan
>> laws in all states in the USA and provinces in Canada.  If one changed it was a
>> major emergency as far as changing Repo letters, etc. and took much longer than
>> it would have if the company would have just used MS Word, Word Perfect or some
>
>Form letters really need revisable form documents, because you are 
>inserting variable length information!  Repossession letters are 
>probably not trying to sell to the recipient, although they may use 
>visual psychology in other ways.

Agree.  Besides needing to be reflowed (they would not buy a conversion
application), these documents were tagged.  I was required to reposition tags
and reflow via cut and paste.  All of this using Acrobat 5.0 ;o).

>
>> On the other hand I worked for a company that provided banking software whose
>> documentation in MS Word.  The changing of a document by a documentation
>> specialist was accomplished with minimal effort.
>
>That is OK if they are selling to business users of Windows, who are 
>likely to have MS Word, and if they don't care about the exact 
>pagination of the document, which will change for each different printer 
>used.  (I suspect they did care about pagination, but either distributed 
>final form documents (on paper) or failed to realise that the pagination 
>would vary.)

All of this was taken into consideration.  The electronic version was included
as PDF and the paper copy was printed from PDF.  MS Word was the working
version.  The PDF versions were the archives.
 
[snip]

Once again, thank you for the in depth explanation of PDF documentation and
documentation in general.  It was an interesting read.

Tom, N5GE - SWOT 3537 - Grid EM12jq

"They that can give up essential liberty
to obtain a little temporary safety 
deserve neither liberty nor safety."

--Benjamin Franklin 1775


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