Why can’t every owner’s manual be online?
Toshiba Owner’s Manuals — I ran into this page while stroling through the Toshiba site and was wowed by the sheer number of owners manuals that have been converted to .pdf files by Toshiba. Hopefully they will put all their historical manuals online too. And every company should do this. It’s crazy not to and must solve a lot of support problems because most owners manuals get lost. Kudos to Toshiba.
As for old manuals for products that are old or from companies that are defunct a central repository done as a public service would be a start. How about we start one?
related links:
Yamaha has something similar here.
This isn’t as big a project as it seems. Since the mid 90’s many manual departments sent PDFs to the printer anyway, so this is just a matter of collecting them and tossing them up on a web server. You’re right, they should all do it. As for older manuals, it’s obviously a bit more work.
Regarding old manuals…note that Heathkit still exists and that they still sell copies of copyrighted manuals. Any of them, going back 50 years.
A friends Fax machine failed.
So, they dug up their Old Xerox All-in-one Fax machine to use.
She didnt have the manual, so called Xerox.
300+ pages, and they wanted $200+ for it.
They also mentioned getting it Online for nothing.
2 empty ink cartiriges later…
she has the BOOK…
First post of the day and GUESS what I get…
Sorry, you can only post a new comment once every 15 seconds. Slow down cowboy.
I can find a PDF of almost anything online.
2. ECA,
I’m just guessing but from observation I’ve noted the “Slow down cowboy” message doesn’t appear to refer to our own personal posts – but it seems to appear whenever multiple Dvorak Denizens are trying to post at precisely the same time.
I guess “Slow down cowboy” means: “Wait for your turn as I save someone else’s comment before I get to saving your comment.”
#3 – Why don’t you try to find a PDF of something useful to say?
4, agreed.
But it also looks as if its Fighting 2 or more, persons trying to post…
Mine lasted for about 6 tries… about 2 minutes.
which looks at about the same time #1 used to type..
How about a diagnostics library as well. The technical reference manuals AND the diagnostic software that goes with it.
Manuals are written on computers. Most of those computers run MS Winblows. There is a freeware PDF convertor, that simply shows up on a system as (write a manual, then print it on…) a printer called (creatively enough) PDFCreator.
Works with those old TXT manuals, those spiffy DOC manuals, READ.ME files, whatever you can print. Works with graphics, scans, your mom, anything you can print.
On a related note, you all stink.
Toshiba wont get kudos from me until they publish their laptop service manuals online like Dell and IBM/Lenovo. I have always disliked Toshiba for this reason and it’s one of the reasons I stick to Thinkpads.
8…a lot of those manuals are put together on Macs, and many on Windows as well. The pros that build these don’t use crap like CutePDF or some freeware…they export PDF directly from InDesign or use Acrobat. And FWIW, there are things in manuals that these freebies can’t print, or look like crap in the resultant PDF. That’s why we use professional tools. 🙂
The problem for older manuals is that pre-1990 most of them were paste-ups…literally sections glued (waxed, actually) to boards. There were no digital manuals. Next, there were several desktop publishing apps used, most of which are obsolete today. Those manuals are the hardest ones to convert. In the mid-90s PDF made things a lot better. Some goofs still send Quark files to printers, but PDF is the rule for transferring files to high-volume printers.
Today, we have a copier that can copy a manual and generate a PDF at the same time, but it’s not perfect either. It’s like those all-in-one printer/scanner/fax systems, but on a lot of steroids.
Where I work we have a cubicle containing thousands of manuals in about 30 file cabinets, and scanning them all would take a year or two. We can’t justify the expense. Some companies don’t even have the manuals to be copied….they take up a lot of space. So, maybe that explains why some companies don’t make them available…they can’t.
The slow down cowboy phenomenon will end on May 1 when the software shifts off of the Netli accelerator. It has to do with conjoined IP addresses of various commenters. The process is slightly incompatible with the spam filter “Spam Karma.” As of May 1 everyone will have their real IP and that will be the end of the problem. The downside to this is that the pages will not load as fast overseas as they do now. The American readers should not experience any major difference.
The problem is one of bandwidth.
I happen to have online a PDF copy of an old Asus motherboard. The PDF was downloaded from the Asus site and as far as I know is still available. However my link appears in google before the Asus one does (if the Asus one is even listed due to the way their site is laid out).
That one, old, PDF has been pulling an increasing percentage of my monthly bandwidth. My monitoring scripts show me how much bandwidth is involved for individual URLs, and I’ve watched it go from 400M in October (when the pdf was put up) to almost 2G last month. That’s a five-fold increase in five months.
I can only presume that if such a scheme was actually floated, it would quickly sink under the weight of massive bandwidth bills.
Not to mention the potential copyright issues.