Re: APIs: Where are the @#$% manuals?

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Booth Martin wrote:
>
> pdf is nice if you have broadband, but otherwise very painful.

I disagree... PDF is always painful!  Even with broadband!  (I have
broadband everywhere I go)

PDF is nice if you want to print a manual and put it into a binder
so that you have a "real book" to look at.   But that's about it.
For online viewing (which is what I want, 99.9% of the time) PDF is a
royal pain in the butt.

What's really frustrating is that IBM obviously has a way to translate
their raw documentation into EITHER HTML or PDF without having to re-write
it.   Thus, it costs them nothing to provide both HTML and PDF copies of
everything -- but they don't.


> I'd think that the page that asks me what continent I live on and what
> version I want could also ask me if I prefer pdf or html.

I don't care how they ask me... just so that I have a choice for
everything :)

> why do they care what continent I am on? No one else asks.

I think that they probably have separate servers in different areas of
the world, and they want to direct you to the one that's the most
efficient for your area -- but that's just a guess.