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From: tml@tik.vtt.fi (Tor Lillqvist)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: cdrom questions
Message-ID: <TML.91Jan24104300@nyyti.tik.vtt.fi>
Date: 24 Jan 91 15:43:00 GMT
References: <1991Jan23.192953.28335@eye.com>
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In-reply-to: paul@eye.com's message of 23 Jan 91 19:29:53 GMT

In article <1991Jan23.192953.28335@eye.com> paul@eye.com (Paul B. Booth) writes:
   2. On a more serious note, has anyone out there used the HP-LASERROM
      documentation product?  What are your impressions of the X-interface
      of this guy, and do you consider the whole concept useful?  Would you
      say that laserrom is a viable alternative to paper manuals?  My current
      support contracts give me 3 sets of paper manuals which are shared among
      some 20 workstations.  I'd like to replace all this paper with laserrom
      docs on all workstations and maybe 1 set of paper manuals.  Reasonable?

We have a subscription to LaserROM/UX.  Some impressions:

	o The X interface is a little crude.  The look-and-feel is a
	  bit like Motif, but without colours and 3d look.

	o On a monochrome display the highlighted keywords in the
	  result of a keyword search are invisible.

	o One of the most common things people ask me is "how do I
	  print out a paper copy of this manual".  So much for
	  replacing printed manuals :-)

	o It seems rather silly to keep simple pictures in scanned
	  form.  (And some of them are very badly scanned, with lots
	  of noise.)  Why not store such pictures in vector form?  OK,
	  I guess these pictures have been originally drawn by hand,
	  so scanning is the only way to get them into LaserROM.

	o (Dreaming...) Why does it use typewriter (fixed-spacing)
	  fonts?  Real (proportional) text fonts would look much
	  nicer.  But then of course the character mode version
	  wouldn't work.  Maybe it should do the paragraph formatting
	  at run time.  Then you could resize the windows and the text
	  would re-format itself automatically.

I would not want to replace all paper manuals with LaserROM.  After
all, you cannot read LaserROM in the bus.  And at home, you don't want
to use the character interface on a slow modem line.
--
Tor Lillqvist,
working, but not speaking, for the Technical Research Centre of Finland