Offline Docs and Tutorials (PDF preffered)
henrytj
Posts: 0
For those of us who are not online 24/7, are there any PDF manuals and tutorials we can study at our offline leisure?
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For what? You can readily turn any web page into a PDF or Windows XPS file - the XPS printer is built into WIndows, or the free PDF Creator is available from SourceForge.
From what I'm seeing, with my limited online time, is that the old Wiki info is for older v.3 and the new document central is in draft mode.
So, are you stating that I have to load each individual topic page, and save/convert it. How many topic pages are there? 10, 20, 30, more? Seems much of the information is in the form of video tutorials. How do you save those? And is every one of the a screenshot with a narrator droning on in a flat voice "click on this. Then click on that, etc" I'm nodding off half way through the video. Sorry, give me a good ole PDF manual any day. Manufacturers are simply getting lazy. In the past, even the free software had much better documentation.
Edit to add I believe you can do the same sort of thing with Evernote...their iPad apps are better so I use that with school stuff but prefer Onenote for home things.
Yes you can with Evernote. Onenote is much fuller featured but may be more than many need. They are both usefull. Among other things, both make clipping a portion of an article or a whole article pretty straight forward and easy (with some caveats) and both automatically create links back to the source of where something was clipped from, which comes in handy.
Another alternative is to select something and paste it into an opendoc/libre doc then save as native or pdf.
Agree totally...I use Evernote at work as their apps for tablets and smart phones are better.
Where a notebook program like this is useful is you can organise it in one area and easily find things.
I will have to look into those. Right now, I have a loaner laptop as my regular (older, very older) computer hasn't run in nearly 6 months.)
I've downloaded several of the currently free training videos. It must be my age, for I am finding that the same informational material in one of these 150MB video would take up only 5-10 pages in a PDF at less than 1/100th the size. And a PDF doesn't have to be repeatedly stopped, backed up, restarted in order to not miss a step. I'm not seeing this trend as an improvement.
Your reply is helpful and a tad terse, it's frustrating to answer a question like this when asked for as many times and knowing there will never be a PDF manual included with the product.
Since it has been decided that all help will be online it's frustrating for some of us when we need a reference without going online so to me to request by the OP is quite reasonable and should be considered.
The OP should take and use what ever means they can to do just as you have suggested because right now it;s as close as anything to a Manual.
Your reply is helpful and a tad terse, it's frustrating to answer a question like this when asked for as many times and knowing there will never be a PDF manual included with the product.
Since it has been decided that all help will be online it's frustrating for some of us when we need a reference without going online so to me to request by the OP is quite reasonable and should be considered.
The OP should take and use what ever means they can to do just as you have suggested because right now it;s as close as anything to a Manual.
I agree with this,
that comment is very frustrating and no solution to users that need a good manual to learn daz software.
when I tell this problem on the luxology forum, people laugh me out.
So last night I decided maybe I should try keeping my own manual, using the version 3 PDF as a starting point, and pasting in all the information I run across in the forums that would be helpful or learn the hard way.
It's not a real answer as it will be mostly incomplete, wrong occasionally, and certainly not clearly written if I'm just cobbling it together from reverse-engineered pasted stuff that I don't always have the time or ability to verify. However, since that's what I'm doing anyway, I might as well save it in one spot so I can refer back to it and search through it rather than trying to bounce back and forth between the old manual, text notes, forum threads, etc.
So here's my question. Has anybody been able to either find a free PDF editor (Windows) that works well, or found a way to export the version 3 manual to something like Microsoft word/OpenOffice?
I tried using the PDFImport plugin for OpenOffice, but it won't intstall, giving me errors, so I gave up on that for the moment. I then found several places online that convert PDF documents to word format, but one had a 2MB limit and couldn't be used, and both of the other ones failed with errors partway into the upload process. Has anybody tried and been successful with any method? It seemed like a good idea last night, but I'm getting pretty discouraged this morning.
Another idea, the 4.x manual can be exported a page at a time which by itself is no good, but are there any web experts out there who can easily automate this to recursively dig through and export the entire thing (minus video tutorials) into one file (and if so, would it even make any sense in that format?)
I finally figured out a way to install the OpenOffice PDFImport plugin; uninstall OpenOffice 4.x and go back to OpenOffice 3.x. I was then able to install the plugin without errors and open the DS version 3 PDF manual.
Unfortunately I completely misunderstood how the plugin and "conversion" works, it does not look like converting from a PDF to an OpenOffice format leaves me with anything even vaguely resembling a document that can be reasonably edited as a manual with inserted and rearanged text, copied fonts, screenshots, an updated table of contents, etc. Looks like I'm back to just keeping a .rtf file with a random pile of addenda in it to dig through, bummer. Ah well, it was worth a shot anyway.