[Elecraft] Printing manuals

[David Woolley (E.L)]

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
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