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I can suggest one good reason for continuing to produce paper manuals.
Last night I was trying to save a document which contained several graphic
elements when I received a groaning message from my 340 MB hard disk.
"Ohhhh," it groaned. "I'm so full, I can't eat another byte."
It turns out that several of those lovely programs such as FrameMaker4,
Word6, CorelDraw and so on are really space hoggers. And the extensive
online documentation has to be responsible for a fair share of this.
On Wed, 21
Sep 1994, Richard Mateosian wrote:
> The paper software manual is dead.
> I'd prefer to believe the opposite. User preferences cited on this list just
> yesterday seem to say the opposite. But consider these facts:
> Nobody has ever learned FrameMaker4 or Word6 or Photoshop3 or any other
> major package by reading the paper documentation supplied with it.
> The size and complexity of software packages are increasing explosively,
> with no end in sight. The technology of paper manuals can't keep up. The
> semiconductor and disk memories that support software advances will provide
> a medium for increasingly complex user guidance and training.
> The technologies that make on-line multimedia user assistance possible are
> planting seeds in users' minds. Paper manuals will continue to appeal to
> users' nostalgia but won't satisfy their expectations.
> Film of the funeral at 11. ...RM
> Richard Mateosian Technical Writer in Berkeley CA srm -at- c2 -dot- org
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* RoMay Sitze rositze -at- nmsu -dot- edu *
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* Only the curious wil learn and only the resolute overcome the *
* obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited *
* me more than the intelligence quotient. -Eugene S. Wilson_ *
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