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Printing (Big) Manuals?
Detritus writes "Many companies have stopped providing hardcopy manuals with their products, electing instead to deliver the manuals in the form of PDF files. This becomes a problem when you have an 800 page reference manual and you need a usable hardcopy that is double-side printed and bound. What is the most cost-effective way of turning a PDF file into a bound document? Cheap ink-jet printers are not designed to do this task at a reasonable speed and cost."
If you are lucky and have access to a decent laser printer at work (like a Canon Imagerunner), take there and print it out. Usually employers are reasonable about such requests. Particularly if you provide your own paper. If they'll let you print at all, they will certainly eat the toner cost for you as well.
We have several students working at our lab and the frequently print out materials for school. Then again, maybe our employer is just 'cool' about such things.
About your only other 'cheap' option is to just focus on the sections you need and print THOSE out.
Outside of that, take it to a printer (kinko's or something) and pay the cost to have it printed and bound (or at least hole-punched). If you NEED it enough, you'll PAY for it if you have no other alternative. Otherwise, your need just isn't that great.
First of all, someone needs to call these companies and scream at them until they stop using PDF. If they never intended to print it, there's no point to PDF for a manual. HTML is just fine, and most browsers (including Mozilla) are more lightweight than the official Acrobat Reader.
Second, if you need to read any sort of electronic document, why not read it electronically? I mean, paper is nice because you can use it even when your computer breaks. Any other reason you want paper? Because you can probably get a decent notebook/tablet pc for less the cost of the equipment to print an 800-page book cheaply, and that way, the text is searchable -- no more thumbing through indexes.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's very sad that programmers still feel the need to have hardcopy manuals, even as producing them becomes less and less practical. (Not just cost -- there's the difficulty of publishing and distributing physical documentation for rapidly-changing products.)
I hate online/on-screen documentation. It's a pain in the ass. Especially when you've only got *one* machine to both work with the program and read the documentation.
Or, perhaps the documentation you need is the service manual for your only (broken) machine that can read the documentation.
Dead trees are just flat out easier to use. For example, when I am working at a computer, say fixing someone else's code, and I need API documentation.
If I'm using online documentation, I have to dink around with the mouse (on-screen documentation is just about worthless to use with a keyboard... the one exception: Unix man). So, I take the mouse, click the button that brings up the documentation, then I have to scroll through and find what I'm looking for. Then I click again, and scroll. Click and scroll... blah. Then, once I have what I am looking for, I click back to the code and start to do what I need to do. Now, I can't memorize the specifics of a complex API call that fast, so I have to click back to the documentation... then back to the code, work... back to the documentation... back to the code, work. Then, if I think I need this again, I save it as a "bookmark"... accessing this bookmark takes longer than my tape flags on a real book.
The same situation using a real book? I use the index. This is fast. I see all the applicable pages at one time, and can make an easy guess at the correct one if the pages are numbered by chapter-page. I turn to this page in the book. I return to my code and read the documentation as needed, maybe turning a page on the book. The code stays on the screen the entire time, and for complicated stuff, I can do a side-by-side comparison without having to juggle windows around. If I might need it again, it gets a color-coded tape flag with a note on what code it applies to written on it.
We should delivering easy-to-use web sites and help files; instead we deliver stupid PDF files that are just huge page dumps.
Web site based documentation... seems like a good idea until you are working somewhere that doesn't have internet access. Like, say, the documentation you need is for the router that's going nuts.
"Help files" and "easy to use" rarely appear in a sentence where "are never" isn't what's in between.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.