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From: peter@citcom.UUCP (Peter Klosky)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: manuals
Message-ID: <64@citcom.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Aug-87 11:00:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: citcom.64
Posted: Thu Aug 27 11:00:48 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Aug-87 09:40:06 EDT
References: <166@lakesys.UUCP> <-621439@cpedev> <742@ssc.UUCP> <26569@sun.uucp>
Organization: Citcom Systems, Inc., Herndon, VA
Lines: 28
Summary: Pedantic comments about value of on-line data over paper copies.

To me, on-line manuals provide help, even in the case where I am at 
a terminal far away from the hard copies.  In the case of our system
here, we have two copies of the manuals, and about a dozen workstations.
Some of the workstations are at people's houses, too, so it is
often a pain when you are at a working terminal, but have no
"man cc" command to find out about a stack size option or whatever.
This problem gets worse when you have three or more operating systems
to deal with.  Requiring all users to have hard copies of all manuals
gets to be a bit prohibitive.

And it is possible to perform a search for a keyword or build an
inverted index for instant search using a computer.  Ever tried
searching on one of these Lexis/Nexis systems?  They can locate
newspaper articles and court cases where certain keywords are
mentioned at high speed; perhaps 6 orders of magnitude faster
than searching microfilm.  It bugs me to take a course at the local
college when I don't have a computer copy of the text;  in
language courses, it would be nice to find example sentences using
a word I'm uncertain about.  Some of the better Unix systems come with
a keyword searching command as part of the on-line manuals, and I, for
one, use it all the time.

Updates to on-line manuals are easier, too.  Just transmit the new 
data over the network.  Updating off-line manuals is more challenging.

-- 
Peter Klosky, Citcom Systems (materiel de telecommunications)
seismo!vrdxhq!baskin!citcom!peter (703) 689-2800 x 235