9 Dec
2008
9 Dec
'08
5:23 a.m.
Gordon JC Pearce MM3YEQ wrote:
der Mouse wrote:
I don't see any way of making a usable plain-text manual. How would you
get the diagrams to work? Little ASCII-art squiggles?
This is actually what PDF is *designed* for.
For sure - but 300MB seems excessive, even with a lot of diagrams. I suspect
they employed someone who either didn't know about or didn't care about
optimising file sizes.
I don't care for PDF much, mainly because it gets so misused - but it is the
only thing possible for jobs like this (unless people decide to use
proprietary formats). It's just a shame that Adobe have bloated their reader
out so much (but thankfully much smaller and faster free alternatives seem to
exist for now)
cheers
Jules
For
example, the ATMega8 user's manual runs to over 300 pages (PDF
downloadable for free)
Sigh. You'd think if they actually wanted to make the documentation
_usable_, they'd make it plain text. Apparently glitz wins out over
usability once again.