Personally, I don't really like the index.html method IBM provides, so I
made a VBS script that takes that index and turns it into a pile of
Windows shortcuts with group directory names and manual titles (bad
characters taken out). Send me an email if you want to try it.
On 2/28/2019 8:06 AM, Wendell Lovewell wrote:
Thanks for the update Sue. I'm not sure how we would find out this information
without your posting it here.
I personally really appreciate you continuing to create the PDF versions of the
manuals. But there are a couple of things that would make them a lot easier
to use.
1) Could you please use the full title names (minus "/" and ":" characters) for
the file names? The 8.3 file names (actually, they aren't all 8-character anymore) are not very
usable. If we download the HLASM and MFA zip files, we get:
asmg1023.pdf
asmi1023.pdf
asmp1023.pdf
asmr1023.pdf
asmtic23.pdf
asmtis23.pdf
asmtiu23.pdf
asmtug23.pdf
azfi100_v1r3.pdf
azfli100_v1r3.pdf
azfpd130.pdf
azfu100_v1r3.pdf
I generally use Windows File Explorer to find a manual I've downloaded. But to be able to find something by
the file system name, I have to open each to determine which manual it is, copy the title (and maybe the
publication number), close the pdf and then rename it. "asmr1023.pdf" is not meaningful.
"SC26-4940-08 HLASM Language Reference.pdf" is. And if the title has a slash, colon, or other
invalid character for a file name, I have to remove those. (There might be reasons to replace the spaces
with underscores.) It's often easier to copy the pub # and title and use "Save As" so that I can
use the full title as a file name. Of course, this breaks any links between manuals.
2) The second thing to please stop dividing the manuals into sections so that
the page numbers referenced from the TOC and all other places within the manual
are the actual PDF page numbers. PDF doesn't (generally) recognize sections
like this, so page numbers cited in the manual are always several pages short
of the PDF page number. (Hyperlinks from the TOC are great, but references to
page numbers within the text are usually not set up as links.)
So, to jump to a page (Ctrl-G in most PDF readers) I usually add at least 10 pages to get close,
then scroll to what the book thinks is the right page. For example, in "asmr1023.pdf",
if you want to go to page 61, you would actually need to enter "77" because of the reset
in the page numbers after the first 16 pages. In John Erhman's wonderful Assembler book there's a
42 page difference, and there are so many references to page numbers in the text that I used a PDF
editor to delete everything prior to what it calls page 1 so that I could go directly to the
referenced page--at the cost of having a table of contents.
Thanks for listening.
Wendell Lovewell
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