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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.
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Sounds like PrintFu is what you're after.
there's more than one way to do me.
Most large doc are laid-out for printing on smaller paper and are actually oversized on A4/8.5x11. This is only good if you have reduced visual acuity. I don't, and usually go for the 4x to save paper and page flipping.
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/learn_book.a spx does mass printing of PDF files, double-sized, bound. Sure, it costs a little bit, but probably less than trying to pull it off yourself.
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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.
I was just looking at a very similar problem:
The Kinko's in SE Portland quotes me about $25 for a single copy, double side printing, comb bound with vinyl cover. Add $1 to do spiral bound. There would be a discount for multiple copies-- and at this price doing a copy for each of us, and a couple of spares for the Jolt spills, might be a good idea.
No way I could do this "in house" for such a low cost.
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.
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.
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For still more money, you can get duplex, a second tray, et cetera. I intend to purchase the postscript simm (about $30) which doubles the memory to only 8MB (sufficient for manuals, though) and provides PS level 2 emulation, to augment the PCL 5 that the printer normally speaks.
The laserjet 2100 is one of HP's finest black and white laser printers, and you can trivially find one with ethernet, or buy one and an ethernet EIO print server, for less than $300. They are not the fastest printers around but my 2100 will probably still be working when the last 1320 has failed :P
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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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Note: some very specialized printers are designed to allow page-flipping; so make sure that the printer documentation explicitly states so.
Read "some very specialized printers" as "almost any laser printer sold in the last ten years."
To be blunt, the way to tell if your manufacturer supports it is to ask them. Some very cheap, commercial-quality printers do this just fine. (The $150 Brother HL-1440 I use not only doesn't have a problem, but includeds a duplex printing mode in its drivers.)
Oh, and it's not @#$!ing "ink". It's "toner." Ink is a liquid, that, in "inkjets", permeates quite a bit deeper into the paper than tonor-flakes.
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I needed a manual printed (perfect bound - like a paperback novel) last year and went with CafePress. They have reasonable prices--I think I spent $15 on a 200-page book, one copy. Decent quality, but the pages were a little yellow.
Then I found Lulu. Same kind of thing, with a base price of $4.53 per book and $0.02 per page. They do have a page limit of 700 pgs, which would translate into a whopping $18.53. Anyone have any experience with them?