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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."
An excellent program if you're into printing manuals yourself is http://www.fineprint.com/products/fineprint/index. html It is a virtual printer that allows some cool options. My favorite being the ability to fit multiple pages onto a sheet thereby saving time, ink and paper.
Here's a list of the feature from the website:
Print Preview: Universal print preview with editing capability. Easily add blank pages, delete pages, and re-sequence jobs.
Ink Saver: Provides options to convert colored text to black and skip graphics.
Multiple Pages on a single sheet: Print 2, 4 or 8 pages on a single sheet of paper.
Watermarks Headers and Footers: Watermark, header and footer option allows documents to be marked with the date, time, system variables or custom text.
Forms and Letterheads: Allows the simplified creation of electronic forms and letterhead. The preview feature shows how output will appear before you print it to ensure correct alignment.
Combine Print Jobs: Allows multiple documents to be combined together as a single print job. This is useful for creating booklets based on web pages, etc.
File saving: Save pages and jobs to TIFF, JPEG, BMP, text and FP formats.
Clipboard Support: Any printed output can be copied to the clipboard in text, bitmap or
Double Sided Printing Support: Booklet making and double sided printing are supported with all documents and printers. Booklets create a professional touch to all documents and are easy to read and carry. Double sided printing cuts paper use in half and reduces travel weight.
Paper Scaling: Allows large pages to be scaled to that they fit on standard paper sizes such as letter or A4.
Adjustable Margins: Margin adjustment allows for increased text sizes for better readability, by using more of the printable area on the page.
Gutter Support: Gutter capability provides space for binding documents.
Multiple FinePrinters: Multiple FinePrinters can be created. This allows the creation of "virtual printers" that have different pre-defined settings. For example, you could have a "booklet printer" that automatically prints a booklet or a "letterhead printer" that prints on your letterhead without the FinePrint dialog box appearing.
Easy server deployment: Install on a server as a shared printer for easy group or enterprise deployment.
It's probably a good option to print the manual on a monochrome printer. The kind of graphics you see in most software manuals don't really suffer from being reduced to grayscale. Still pretty expensive, though.
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.) For that, I have to apologize on behalf of my profession, Technical Writing, which has done a really lousing job of keeping up with the state of the art. We're still not good at creating the kind of well-structured electronic documents that make hard copy unnecessary. Even though most of our work never sees hardcopy, we're still horribly bound to desktop publishing models. We should delivering easy-to-use web sites and help files; instead we deliver stupid PDF files that are just huge page dumps. We don't even exploit the PDF format as much as we should -- it's a horribly obsolete format, but it does support some basic hypertext concepts that would be very helpful, if more people bothered to use them.
Then again, it's not all our fault. As I said, most techwriters are way behind the times in content management technology. But they only get away with it because documentation isn't a big priority. People in the software industry underestimate its importance and are unwilling to spend a lot of money on it. The don't grasp the skill it takes to do the job right, or the technical difficulties involved in creating and maintaining huge masses of documentation. Hint: it's not a lot easier than maintaining equivalent amounts of source code.
When I say "people in the software industry" I guess I mostly mean "developers". Whose perception drive a lot of decision making. Mangement often is dominated by former developers, and even when it isn't their decisions are colored by the code-hacker's view of reality. So maybe it is your guys' fault after all.
I usually use the "print multiple pages" filter on kprinter just to get 2 pages on each face of the sheet, so I get 4 pages printed with each sheet, this way is much easier to carry.
.ps file and gives you 2 files to print, one for each side of the sheets, so you can easily have the pamphlet.
/bin/sh
The size letter is normally enough to read it without problems, my Kyocera (damm cheap, 40€, if you buy a used one) does a good work even with small typefaces.
When the number of pages are less than 80, I use the pamphlet filter, I still get the 4 pages for sheet but you can fold it by half, put a pair of staples and you get a nice booklet to read.
This small script accepts a
#!
psbook "$1" | psnup -2 -pa4 | psselect -e > "A.$1"
psbook "$1" | psnup -2 -pa4 | psselect -o > "B.$1"
Most commercial software manuals, pdf or otherwise, specify in the copyright section that reproduction of the manual requires the company's consent before doing so. Not thinking this was actually enforced, I took a CD with a 1000+ page pdf manual for Steinberg Cubase to be printed, only to be told that they couldn't print it due to the copyright restriction.
The solution was simple enough, I emailed Steinberg asking permission to print it for personal use only, yadda yadda, and they replied (rather quickly, surprisingly) and said it was ok. Took a printout of the email to Kinkos and they happily printed the manual for me.
I realize I could have easily forged the email from Steinberg, but I considered the possibility, however unlikely, that Mr Steinberg would find out and make an example out of me via a hearty copyright lawsuit, thus ending my home recording career even before it started.
Not that I have anything against Germans.
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Of course if your talking a large manual which can run into the hundreds of pages (i have seen them at 800 or more) you could be talking about as much as 5.00+( 0.08*800.00)=69 USD (chuckle). I also assume that this would not be a one off so over the course of a year you could be talking several hundread Cold green.
Even for a slim 150 page manual your talking 17 USD . For those types of prices you cant get some nice reference books.
My soloution (which i use myself and which i stated in an earlyer post) was to get an older laptop with a nice screen to use as a glorified book reader.
I paid 200 for a P3-600mhz with 256MB ram(a really good price at the time, so perhaps it will cost you a little more. Though a 600mhz p3 is overkill for just a pdf reader, but i use it for other things aswell) with a nice 15" screen . It has served me well and works great as a glorified book reader.
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I used to agree...now, I've entirely adjusted. The last time I had eye strain was back when displays were below 1024x768.
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