Please consider putting the entire user manual on a single web page so it is then searchable via Ctrl-F.
The problem with the current set-up is the manual is divided into a whole bunch of individual pages so it is not easily searchable.
Having the user manual on a single page also means we can print the manual to PDF ourselves and so always have the laest and greatest version available off-line.
Also if you only offered the manual in PDF format you could off-load the manual download BW to a server with a lower-priced BW, it BW cost is a factor.
All major browsers these days support PDF document viewing and PDF documents for the longest time also support internal clickable bookmarks for easy cross-reference.
PDF documents can also be easily created and maintained via all major text editors just by printing to PDF.
Please do consider changing your current version’s User Manual over to PDF, or at least having the option to show the entire manual on a single web page so we can print the manual to PDF ourselves. Thanks so much!
We had a volunteer which printed each page to PDF and compiled a single-document manual. I will ask him if he will do it again for us as it was a few years ago. I too am a Control-F addict.
One thing you can do, is force a google search to only use our website.
For example, to search for “bandwidth”, you go to google.com and then type this:
“site:wfview.org bandwidth” (without the quotes).
I am suggesting moving away from where you need a volunteer to convert the user manual from a collection of web pages to PDF because in that case the PDF will likely always lag the current version, as it does now.
Also I’d rather not have to ask google to asist in a search that should be local, because again it is likely the version on google’s server could lag the actual version. Also an interet connection that’s not always available would be required when off-line.
If keeping the web as is is important, perhaps a link could be added for the same manual as a single web page so that page could be saved as a PDF by the user.
You could replace links to other pages with bookmarks to the same page.
Multi-Page functionality would be preserved and the bookmarks would remain functional in the PDF, an added bonus.
If a certain sybtax is adhered-to for the web page names, then a script could be written to generate a new file with all the web pages in it with the links changed to bookmarks (they are very similar).
The script could run in whatever editor you’re currently using to maintain the user manual’s web pages.
Crawl the User Manual directory to load all the web pages,
Change the links from URLS to bookmarks,
Save all as a single file for posting on Wfview’s web,
Print to PDF and also post on Wfview’s web.
Could run on a chrono once a day/week.
Could even run automatically every time there’s a change or an addition to the manual’s web pages (probably overkill).
Well, if anyone wants to write a script to try this out, I think that would be great. We can start with just ingesting a list of pages to concatenate and convert.