About Manual Maker

©James W. Walker, 1995


Standalone documents in general	

When documentation is provided on disk, it is often in the form of a standalone document, because users cannot be assumed to own any particular word-processor other than SimpleText.  SimpleText is too limited, as it does not allow more than 32K of text and does not provide any indexing or searching.


Manual Reader	

Manual Reader is a low-overhead standalone document.  It displays styled text and pictures, organized in chapters and sections.  The text is not editable, but can be copied to the clipboard.  The most obvious thing Manual Reader doesn’t do is print.  But if you really want to print a Manual Reader document, you can save each chapter in SimpleText form, and then print them with SimpleText.

Manual Reader does not make any provisions for the possibility that fonts used in the document may not be installed on the user’s Mac.  It is up to the document’s creator to choose fonts that almost everyone will have.


Manual Maker	

Manual Maker is a simple interface-free application that converts a collection of SimpleText files into one Manual Reader document.  See the chapter “Using Manual Maker” for details.