Title:
the pdf version of CF2016 docs are woefully incomplete: offering mostly only LINKs to online docs for details :-(
| View in TrackerStatus/Resolution/Reason: Closed/Fixed/Fixed
Reporter/Name(from Bugbase): Charlie Arehart / Charlie Arehart (Charlie Arehart)
Created: 05/20/2016
Components: Documentation
Versions: 2016
Failure Type:
Found In Build/Fixed In Build: CF2016_Update1 / docs
Priority/Frequency: Normal / All users will encounter
Locale/System: ALL / Windows 10
Vote Count: 1
Yikes, the design/intent of the PDF version of the CF2016 docs has had a curious (and I think tragic) change.
The PDFs have (since CF's inception) had the complete contents of the online/HTML version, every page. In the case of the CFML Reference, it showed the details of every tag and function (which had indeed grown to over 2,000 pages in CF11. And in the case of the "Developing CF Apps" manual, it was over 3,000 pages.)
But in the new CF2016 PDF versions (offered on the left at at https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/home.html), the PDFS are MUCH shorter. The CFML Reference (http://helpx.adobe.com/pdf/coldfusion_cfml_ref.pdf) is only 270 pages, and the Dev Apps manual only 95!). At first, I thought it was a truncation mistake.
Now I see it's a seeming intentional decision (or maybe a mistake): the CFML Reference, for example, has only LINKS to the online docs, where you'd need to go to get the details for each tag/function.
Why is this a problem? Well, what if one downloaded the PDF so as to be able to read/search the docs, offline? We can no longer do that.
But it's worse, and here is where I think it's perhaps really a mistake: the Dev Apps manual has often only a page or a few in each of its chapters, and for many there's a link to get the additional details for the sections and subsections. But in some cases, there is no such link. So the chapter (which used to perhaps be 50 pages) is now just 1, because the doc was not designed to have a table of contents as it were for the chapter, so an unknowing reader might think there's only that one (or a few pages) about that topic, which is terrible.
With all this, it's like someone decided to only go "x levels" deep when creating the PDF. Was it intentional? Was it a mistake?
Either way, Adobe, PLEASE give us complete PDF versions of the manuals.
And if there's some motivation that led to wanting such "subsetted" manuals, please offer those separately (and clearly marked as such). Even then, someone MUST revisit the docs to make sure (in all manuals) that if a topic is "cut short" because of this decision, the reader clearly sees that there is more to the topic, available online.
----------------------------- Additional Watson Details -----------------------------
Watson Bug ID: 4155931
Reason: BugVerified
External Customer Info:
External Company:
External Customer Name: Charlie Arehart
External Customer Email:
External Test Config: My Hardware and Environment details:Attachments:
Comments: