There seems to be an unnecessary association of:
 
Printed manual = Comprehensive, well laid out, well organized,
                 professionally done manual, with indices, table of
                 contents, etc.
 
On-line manual = Random assortment of files with random pieces of useful
                 information, but considerably less well organized (sort
                 of like we have now).
 
I don't consider the above description of "on-line manual" to be a
manual--it's an assortment of random useful data that tries to
compensate for the absence of a manual.  If there were a true manual,
then an on-line version could be available in "straight-text" and
PostScript forms, and clearly a printed version could be easily created
(not so easily the other way around).
 
I do hope, BTW, that L-Soft's current efforts in creating a manual will
be to create a _real_ one.  (It is rather surprising that a commercial
product does not have one, and a rather time-consuming process--both on
the parts of requesters and the kind respondents on this list--to get
answers to simple questions.  I'd like to see this list evolve to
addressing the real esoteric problems that cannot be anticipated, or are
configuration dependent, or whatever, but that cannot happen till there
is a real manual.
 
As an example, although the Keywords documents is comprehensive in the
list of keywords supported, it is excessively and unnecessarily terse
about what each one does.  And there are some things that are simply not
explained anywhere other than through a rather cryptic (to the
uninitiated) and cumbersome process of looking up archives to see if
anyone has ever asked that question before.
 
Shahrukh Merchant