Douglas, obviously you have not been to
 
   ftp://ftp.lsoft.com/ftp/listserv/beta-1.8c/manuals-beta/
 
lately.  The 1.8c manuals are indexed.  I won't say they're "well-indexed"
because I am not a professional indexer, but I've tried to make sure most
of the important things are in the index.  (The ASCII copies are not
indexed because they do not have pagination.)
 
Regarding ASCII, no one has <ever> said that there <will not> be a plain
ASCII text version of any of the manuals.  What I said was that I do them
last because quite frankly they are a pain in the (censored) to format
the way I want them.  I don't want to start the argument again that we
should be writing manuals in ASCII or in SCRIPT or whatever, because we've
been over that ground before.  The point is that the Site Manager's manual
has been available in text format since at least January 3 and I'm putting
the List Owner's Manual up in text format now (since I realize that
I've neglected to do so).  In any case, there <will> be text versions of
all of the manuals, and they will be available when 1.8c is released.
 
Nathan