I prefer Hard Copies of Manuals

[Muad’Dib]

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to have an actual manual in my hand too read through. I know some manufacturers like Arturia, have online video tutorials or online manuals. Because, they are trying to save paper. I, on the other hand like a lot of you grew up with having an actual manual in your hand too read. I know you can go online and down load copies of manuals, but I hate having too scroll through multiple pages to get to the section I need. Oh sure I could print a copy, but that still takes time, and is only one sided.

[KuruPrionz]

Got to Fedex Office and ask them to help you set up the self-serve copier with double-sided on 3 hole drill paper.

Then you can keep several manuals in a nice 3 ring binder, add tabs, etc.

 

I don't do that for everything but I do it for some things. My Korg Wavedrum came with a printed manual, for what it cost it ought to!!!!!

[KuruPrionz]

Also, with software being updated all the time, printing hard copies for everybody is really wasteful. Sometimes that manual is only current for 6 months or so.

[Muad’Dib]

Got to Fedex Office and ask them to help you set up the self-serve copier with double-sided on 3 hole drill paper.

Then you can keep several manuals in a nice 3 ring binder, add tabs, etc.

 

I don't do that for everything but I do it for some things. My Korg Wavedrum came with a printed manual, for what it cost it ought to!!!!!

 

That"s a thought?

[Muad’Dib]

Also, with software being updated all the time, printing hard copies for everybody is really wasteful. Sometimes that manual is only current for 6 months or so.

 

True!

[Docbop]

Especially after working in computer industry for way too long I prefer printed manuals. I can find info faster and can write notes and highlight things so a fan of paper books and manuals. Only time I like ebooks are books I read for pleasure, especially since I typically read when out having something to eat.

[GRollins]

You can't flip back and forth between pages in a PDF (or whatever) the way you can with a paper manual. For some cosmic reason the information I'm seeking is always spread out in different places in the manual, so I just stick a finger in between two pages and bop back and forth to my heart's content. Doing that in an electronic manual isn't anywhere near as efficient.

 

They're not doing it to save the planet, they're doing it to save themselves money and using the Green argument as a rationalization. Yes, cutting trees to make paper has environmental consequences, but so does the burning of electricity to read a PDF, so it's not as though an electronic manual is somehow a perfect solution.

 

Grey

[Mark Schmieder]

There is nothing as effective as ten fingers that can quickly placemark and cross-reference. With printed materials, you can quickly explore stuff you don't know, in an y random order, with multiple contexts, and use a variety of learning techniques that work best for YOU. I consistently place at the genius IQ level for the ability to see patterns (which explains why I'm good at math), but not much else -- my linear visual memory sucks.

 

The computer-centric approach is especially penalizing a lot of young people in school today, who would be doing much better with books than with computers. One-thing-at-a-time just doesn't cut it for a lot of us; we don't notice the patterns. And on a computer, you usually have to already know what you're looking for, which limits exploratory learning and growth.

 

The worst of all though, are "user manuals" as video "tutorials". You are captive to the order of presentation that ONE person thought the most logical (videos are difficult to explore randomly and to mark for a return visit), as well as that person's priorities on what material matters the most. I have tried explaining this to several vendors, to no avail; they don't get it.

[Ledbetter]

PDF manuals are easily searchable and you can carry a hundred of them in your tablet. Terribly inconvenient.

[AUSSIEKEYS]

Better on the eyes too

[BRW]

I hate when you buy a $3000-4000 instrument and get a 5-page "Getting Started" guide with it..........aaaaand the important stuff a.ka a "Reference Manual" is always download-only these days.

 

As suggested, I do the print thing (two-sided, bound), but it's an extra hassle. The iPad / PDF thing sort of works - and having multiple guides (and sheet music, and magazines etc. etc.) is great, but STILL I'd be willing to say that it IS faster to flick through actual paper to find what you're looking for.

[Stokely]

Not me, I've also been in IT for decades and the real problem with paper: my eyesight is way worse than it used to be (for up-close stuff) and I never can find any reading or regular glasses!

 

It's nice having the pdfs available online so you don't really even need to save them.

 

Furthermore, I find myself getting on forums and watching youtube vids if I need to figure something out just as much as I search the manual.

[KuruPrionz]

I do like hard copy, but mainly for hardware, or software that doesn't update often.

 

I often will type a concise "word list" to describe a problem, add the word "forum" to that and see what answers I get from other users.

f I recall correctly, that's how I found MPN.

[Joe Muscara]

Every time Apple updates Logic Pro X, the manuals in Apple Books get updated. You can always have the current version. As Ledbetter says, the searching is better as well.

 

Do I miss printed manuals? Sometimes, but I've gotten used to not having them. Meanwhile, does anyone want the shelf full of programming books I have from the early 2000s? Smalltalk, BSD 4.1, WebObjects, iPhone Programming (probably version 4 or so), and many others?

[Muad’Dib]

My preference for a hard manual, is more for keyboards and synthesizer. Like trying to figure out how too use the Sequencer on my Roland D-20. I did find a YouTube Video, but the guy doing the video, did not fully explain the process. He spent more time talking, then going step by step of what too do? This is why if I had a manual, I could sit down and read it.

[The Real MC]

My major pet peeve with Logic Pro X is that they provide neither a hard copy or a PDF of the user manual. You have to access their manual online. That means it cost ME money because I have to use my internet bandwidth, and I refuse to put my music computer on the internet. I wound up printing the manual and kept it in notebooks.

 

Then there are gear that need NO manual... my Eventide 2016 has a very intuitive control interface, and the user manual is a single sheet printed on both sides - and that's ALL you need.

[ChiefDanG]

My major pet peeve with Logic Pro X is that they provide neither a hard copy or a PDF of the user manual. You have to access their manual online. That means it cost ME money because I have to use my internet bandwidth, and I refuse to put my music computer on the internet. I wound up printing the manual and kept it in notebooks.

 

 

I have PDFs on my (iBooks) iPad of:

LogicPro X manual, updated for 10.5

Logic Instruments

Logic FX

[EscapeRocks]

My major pet peeve with Logic Pro X is that they provide neither a hard copy or a PDF of the user manual. You have to access their manual online. That means it cost ME money because I have to use my internet bandwidth, and I refuse to put my music computer on the internet. I wound up printing the manual and kept it in notebooks.

 

 

When you go to the Apple site, you are given the choice of viewing the Logic Pro X manual online, or downloading the .PDF, which is what I did.

[Joe Muscara]

Or you can load the Logic and MainStage manuals as books in the Apple Books app, available on iOS and Mac. These are not PDFs. They are in the same format as other books from the Apple Books store. You can have it on an iPad next to your music computer that's not on the internet.

[ProfD]

I grew up loving books and printed materials. Then, I was confronted with the reality of having to move, house and store it.

 

A hard copy has its place from a tactile perspective.

 

Nowadays, I'm perfectly fine with an electronic copy. CTRL_F works great too.

[John Tweed]

When I started in IT about 35 yrs ago we had rooms full of manuals. Awful things. I"m much happier now with online manuals. The few hard copy manuals I"ve got with instruments soon ended up out of date after system upgrades.

 

Nowadays I still dabble in computer programming. Everything I need is on the internet. I can open up several pages at once in different windows. If I run into an error message I can search for that on the net. Plus there"s heaps of tutorials about everything.

 

No going back for me.

[The Real MC]

My major pet peeve with Logic Pro X is that they provide neither a hard copy or a PDF of the user manual. You have to access their manual online. That means it cost ME money because I have to use my internet bandwidth, and I refuse to put my music computer on the internet. I wound up printing the manual and kept it in notebooks.

 

 

When you go to the Apple site, you are given the choice of viewing the Logic Pro X manual online, or downloading the .PDF, which is what I did.

 

THANK YOU

 

That PDF was NOT there two years ago. Back then they only offered online or iBook version.

[Tom Williams]

Back when the VAX documentation set was bigger than the Harvard Classics...

 

...When Donald Knuth suspended work on his magnum opus to create a typesetting package that was worthy of the material he was writing...

 

...indices were created by human beings who wrote and read the manual, generally writers who also understood the technical content. You could look up the word "baud" in the index and it might include "see 'bit rate'." In short, an index was a useful tool for finding information.

 

Since the advent of WYSIWYG word processors, indexing has become automated, which means if the manual uses the term "phrase repetition" you're SOL if you search for the word "loop."

 

We have now gotten so used to that weakness that we professional looker-uppers know to include synonyms in our google searches, e.g., . Probably half my value in my IT job is that I have a big vocabulary, which aids searching.

 

In conclusion: we love Ctrl-F only because we've forgotten how bloody useless the index has become.

 

Disclaimer: I have many paper books, but read almost exclusively from fluorescent screens nowadays.

[Tom Williams]

One more disjoint thought: I might respect online / downloadable documentation more if the companies actually maintained it. But the corporate-supplied documentation for some of my favorite toys, like the XR-18 and especially the PC3 series, has been painfully lazy.

[Docbop]

Two of the software companies I worked for customers always loved the usability and documentation/manuals for products. One company made developer software and the other networking and email software they also of all the companies I was on the new product team that the documentation team had members on the new products team right from the begin stages of the projects. It was great having the people who had to explain how things work and what error message meant be involved with the design of things.

 

A third company I worked for most people liked our documentation a lot for something other would complain about. There was fair amount of redundancy in our manual and it was intentional. We discovered it was better to repeat ourselves when necessary than to assume people read all the manual already.

 

Now the one thing in the software dev' tool company that most never discovered was the real meaning of one of our error messages the software would output now and then. The message was like Error 9987 and some gobety gook then please call tech support. Basically the error meant we don't have a clue what went wrong. That somewhere deep in the bowels of lower level of the software something happen and there's no error handler for it, or that the error when bubbling up thru all the layers of error handling the error number disappeared. Microsoft and most software companies have their own "I haven't got a clue" error message.

 

Fun behind the scenes of the software world.

[Reezekeys]

Anyone try these things called "keyboard shortcuts" in a PDF reading program? This is what my free Apple Preview program does:

 

â Command-option-G, type the page you want to go to, hit Enter and you're there.

â Type is too small? Command+ (plus) to zoom in. Two fingers on the trackpad to move around.

â Type something into the search box, all occurrences show up in a sidebar, click the one you want, you're on that page with the search term highlighted.

â Most manuals I've seen have an index. Hover the mouse near an entry and it turns into a pointing finger. Click and you're on that page.

 

Of course these handy features are probably available to any PDF reader program â I'm not touting any Apple superiority. I just think this surge of affection for printed manuals may be a little bit of looking through rose-tinted glasses. Especially since the manuals usually reference a software product that we may actually be running at the same time. Nobody's making a case we should have PDF manuals for farm equipment, are they?

[Song80s]

I memorize the manual

 

Thus it is stored permanently

[Docbop]

I memorize the manual

 

Thus it is stored permanently

 

When I was working for one of the great networking software companies there was this crazy, but great tech woman on our team. We had a new release coming and had been given the manual. When the woman was asked if she had digested the manual yet she said no. When asked why she said I need to save some space for some really nasty thoughts up there I can't waste it all on tech. That ended our meeting we were all laughing too hard.

[Song80s]

I memorize the manual

 

Thus it is stored permanently

 

When I was working for one of the great networking software companies there was this crazy, but great tech woman on our team. We had a new release coming and had been given the manual. When the woman was asked if she had digested the manual yet she said no. When asked why she said I need to save some space for some really nasty thoughts up there I can't waste it all on tech. That ended our meeting we were all laughing too hard.

 

That's funny. Working 70 hrs a week can make a person bent

 

I worked for sun micro

[Docbop]

I memorize the manual

 

Thus it is stored permanently

 

When I was working for one of the great networking software companies there was this crazy, but great tech woman on our team. We had a new release coming and had been given the manual. When the woman was asked if she had digested the manual yet she said no. When asked why she said I need to save some space for some really nasty thoughts up there I can't waste it all on tech. That ended our meeting we were all laughing too hard.

 

That's funny. Working 70 hrs a week can make a person bent

 

I worked for sun micro

 

I worked for Sun for awhile the Tops division then when working at Banyan Networks (where the story above happened) Sun tried to get me back for their short lived Intel workstation. The ISP I worked for was all Sun gear so Sun loved us and would fly us up to see future and new products. I'm a big fan of SunOS and Sun workstations.