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Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Kill the Trees . . . but not Today

This is a question I have faced and asked for the last 8251 days (22 years, 7 months, 3 days) - In The Age Of Screen Time, Is Paper Dead? Steve Drummond/Sep 9, 2017. Many times, the answer was a "No, it's not" but usually after a lot of diversions down single-case use cases, such as "What if the user wants to only have a section of the doc available, not the entire PDF? They would print just that page rather than open the PDF and navigate to the page they want to refer to, right?" Perhaps the best (or worst, depending upon your perspective) is when I worked at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa. Manual typing the TOC, printing the manual, manually verifying the TOC is correct, and then reprinting if incorrect...I call that hell.

Sometimes, I recall the process by which we created the user manual at my first job. For each software version being sent out, we would ship:
  1. a user manual - 3 x 3" ring binders
  2. a data area manual - 1 x 1" ring binder
  3. a database manual - 1 x 3" ring binder 
  4. a reports manual - 1 x 3" ring binder 
  5. 13 volumes of training manuals - a mixture of 1" & 2" 3 ring binders (I don't remember how many of each).
I've come a long way in my career.

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