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Real Men Don’t Read Manuals-Part 2
October 25, 2007

Last episode we talked about the traditional disdain many people feel about reading software manuals.  We also discussed that this was most likely inadvertently modeled behavior during child development. Such as this.
 
But I also admitted that I personally find it useful to read software manuals. Maybe I am weak minded like the storm troopers in Star Wars and susceptible to Jedi mind tricks from my mentor Frank Romano who would  joke during seminars, “The definition of a consultant is someone who reads the manual”.

So imagine my surprised over the last few days as I searched without luck to find a manual on the Acrobat 8 installation disks. This was impossible - this is not one of those companies who we love to hate. This is a company we love to love. A company that we not only love the products but also the vision that has helped shape our industry.

But I needed the manual to update my course on Editing and Prefighting PDF files. Why? Because manuals contain important details, they explain things, they tell you how and why things work. It’s always important to learn about the new features but its even more important to understand whats going on under the hood. That is the only way to troubleshoot problems. And lets face it editing and prefighting in prepress is all about trouble shooting.

So being the search engine junky I am, I did a Google search of  “Adobe Acrobat 8 professional user manual” and came up with this discussion thread on one of the Adobe support boards.

Reading through this I found myself smiling and nodding. Maybe it is the curmudgeon in training coming out, but I have to admit I agreed with most of the complaints about the missing manual on the site. Someone said “There simply is no printed manual for Acrobat 8. If you want something printed, buy a good third-party book!”

That sounds crazy to me. I am spending hundreds of dollars on this software and upgrade it with every release. Do I have to buy another version of the “PDF Bible” by Padova for another $40? I have a whole library of them already. Would it be that hard to include a 22 MB file on a DVD disk?

One person pointed out that a competitive advantage Quark offers over Adobe is a manual. OMG is that a door Adobe wants to open, giving their competition advantages especially over something as basic as a user manual. But there is a little good news. Despite the questionable judgment of NOT including the manual on the installation disks it is available for download.

What’s the moral of the story. Its Ok to be a real man and not read manuals when your assembling Ikea furniture for your home, you can always take it apart and put it back together the right way. But in my opinion when your learning new software, and you want to reduce the learning curve do it the old fashioned way - read the manual.

Posted by Howie Fenton on October 25, 2007 | Comments (0)