PDF Manual files with EDA tools?

[Chris56000]

Hi!

One of my perpetual gripes with many of the EDA/PCB design tools I have tried over many years is the subject of user manuals, not only are makers like Altium trying to con you into paying up to (and over!) £1000 for compulsory maintainence, they have the nerve to do away with basic manual support as well –AD hasn't supplied any printable bookwork since v.14, Orcad won't let you get at their books from their website without costly maintainence, Vutrax is the same, I've never seen any books for Labcenter Proteus, and I've a nasty feeling the other vendors are going the same way!

Surely, even if you only request a time or feature limited trial version, you ought to be entitled to some basic bookwork included in the disc/download, especially when you consider the price of some of these suites?

Chris Williams

[PlainName]

I've never seen any books for Labcenter Proteus

They used to do them. For a reasonable fee I can probably bear to part with one

[Feynman]

I can only tell for Pulsonix. In the program path there is a "Documentation" folder with about 20 PDF files: A 466 page general "User's Guide" and separate user guides for each software option. The documents are included in the trial installation as well. As far as I know trial and full installation are actually the same binary. It's just a matter of a license being present if Pulsonix starts as trial (pin limited) or full featured. The software also shipped with a printed out book version of the general user's guide, which of course I haven't looked into once

[olkipukki]

If I not mistaken, OrCAD has all documentation available in PDFs. These implemented in a proper tool - FrameMaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker) converts into PDF/html as required, not like Altium html to pdf renderer

[Karel]

No problem here, everything in HTML, PDF and EPUB:

https://docs.kicad.org/5.1/

[nctnico]

If I not mistaken, OrCAD has all documentation available in PDFs. These implemented in a proper tool - FrameMaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker) converts into PDF/html as required, not like Altium html to pdf renderer

The manual that comes with Orcad is browser based but also contains PDFs with step-by-step guides. But to be honest even I just use the video material available online to learn how particular functions work.

[johnboxall]

Diptrace... pdf from https://diptrace.com/support/request-support/