>No, no, a thousand times NO!
>
>A proper printed manual is designed a printed final product from
>the ground up, and it has a proper index created FOR that printed,
>bound document.  Without the index the usefullness of the manual
>is very greatly reduced.
>
>Douglas

For my style, I actually find that referencing a section number is by far
superior to referencing a page number.  After all, pages can change from
version to version of the software, but sections usually have very little
modification neccessary.  I'm sure that this makes upkeep of the manual
significantly easier as well from L-Soft's perspective.

This may surprise you, but after I had printed out the entire manual when
I was just getting started with list ownership, all 200 some odd pages of
it, I found it so easy to find exactly what I was looking for because
their were SECTIONS to look within, and finding sections is much easier
than finding page numbers, particularly as printers will print different
sized fonts and perhaps different fonts depending upon the printer
capabilities.

In fact, I've noticed many such reference materials I've bought which work
under very similar ideas, particularly software manuals for sophisticated
software products.  They'll often say, for example,

0.1   Hardware requirements
0.2   Software purpose
1.0   An Introduction to software package X
1.1   Installation instructions
1.1.1 Easy install procedure
1.1.2 Custom install procedure
2.0   A quick start to software package X

etc, etc, etc.

Often, these sections will be seperated from each other by page breaks,
something which is very difficult to do in the modern day of HTML and with
the knowledge that people will be using different fonts and font sizes to
view it which will inevitably never line up properly unless you pick just
the right one, but the Lynx printout was very good for its purpose because
it uses a standard size font and it automatically understands where to
line things up properly.

Again, just my preferences.  YMMV, as they say.

Glenn