I just came back into z/OS CA product support and noticing that all manuals for products have been jammed into a single PDF. I was wondering if I am the only one that doesn't like this from a useability perspective? Help me out please.

[Anon Anon]

Case in point.  I have one PDF for MIM for z/OS 12.1.  The PDF has 1412 pages. It contains everything you would expect from all the manuals previously.  It is a nightmare to navigate.

[Laurie McKenna]

Hi,

 

Thanks for letting us know that you'd prefer to be able to access individual PDFs of our content. We are working on providing that very option for you very shortly.

 

In the meantime, if there is a particular section that you'd like to access immediately, please let me know and I'll generate that PDF for you.

 

Thanks.
Laurie

 

[Kevin Wick]

Yes, this is a nightmare for ACF2 as well, because the manuals are so big.  Here's the idea to vote for in ACF2 land: Export Single Manual to PDF

[Bill Matthias III]

I first heard of this new concept of one PDF for an entire product back in April.  I voiced strong objection to it as well as sending an email to John Baker in Tech Pubs concerning this.  1) Some of us mainframers still prefer to print out key product manuals for a) quick reference and b) highlighting important items as well as c) writing in personal notes and further references.  2) The other disadvantage is that with a large contingent of CA manuals, downloading a "Godzilla" manual for each product sucks up a very large amount of laptop disk space.  Yes during normal periods these manuals need to be on a shared disk for all however, for afterhours support and DR exercises having the significant manuals on a local laptop becomes very handy.

 

This move of creating the "Godzilla" PDFs is simply a move by CA to cut corners to save manpower time and by eliminating the creation of separate manuals.  This is also just like when they started eliminating standard Indexes for each manual and reducing the number of diagrams.  Using an online search can be fast and efficient however, for a product command or parameter that happens to be a common English word that is used through out any text document it takes longer to skip over all of the text words that are found by an online search.  A well done TOC and Index is a very crucial part of a well done reference manual.     

[Kevin Wick]

Using an online search can be fast and efficient however, for a product command or parameter that happens to be a common English word that is used through out any text document it takes longer to skip over all of the text words that are found by an online search. A well done TOC and Index is a very crucial part of a well done reference manual.

Agreed.  Relying on AuthorIt and Apache Lucene to generate the index has decreased search quality.  Things are now much more difficult to find.

[JBaker-CA]

Hey, Bill! Good to hear from you! I have some news to share or perhaps echo, and some questions for you. First the news:

 

As I mentioned in April, the reason for caching single, albeit large, PDFs was to offer a minimal-effort download in lieu of the PDF-on-demand capability we had previously. I am pleased to echo Suzi's note above that we have now restored PDF-on-demand. If you sign in using your CSO credentials and go to an individual facet - say "Installing" – you’ll see a link named “PDF.”  Click that link to get a PDF just for the installation information. Very similar to the older installation guide format. Generating a PDF from a parent page automatically includes all of the child pages. This lets you decide how much or how little information you want to see in a single PDF.

 

As I noted in the CADRE user conference, CA has moved away from a book and bookshelf paradigm to online delivery. As such, we are relying on machine search to help aid you in finding relevant content based on your search terms. We do still, of course, have the ToC navigation pane on the left side of the DocOps window. We had also talked about some of the SEO techniques we are applying to our doc to improve search-ability. Are you searching on individual terms, or with more than one search term as was recommended? Can you supply us with some specific examples of additional searches you’ve tried and not gotten hits that are relevant to you? As I mentioned in my presentation, SEO is an art form, much like indexing, although considerably faster to implement. We are working diligently to improve the Find rates for content, and truly appreciate your help in making these improvements.

 

My next question is about e-document sizes. To get just the "key manuals" you mentioned, did you first download the entire DAT bookshelf and then extract the individual PDFs you wanted from it? What did you do with the remainder of the bookshelf after that? When I compare the entire v15 bookshelf to the whole-DocOps-space PDF, I see that the PDF is 1/5^th to 1/6^th of the bookshelf size. Large PDFs *can* be cumbersome to navigate from the ToC, but the Adobe Acrobat Reader’s search is fairly robust. Combined with the PDF-on-demand, these factors could help speed up your searches in any DR testing, or heaven forbid, actual emergency.

 

Looking forward to hearing from you on the search terms so that we can make it better!

[Suzi_Westmoreland]

Hello,

Thanks for the feedback and an update to my post from last week. The ability to create individual PDFs is available again on DocOps.ca.com. When you click PDF or EPUB from any DocOps page, DocOps creates a PDF or ePub that includes content from that parent page and all of its child pages. Please let us know how you like this functionality by posting a comment on DocOps.ca.com.

 

Regards,

Suzan Westmoreland

[Marcel van Ek]

I noticed this too with CA-OPS/MVS doc, but after questioning it, CA very quickly restored the separate docs. Thanks!

 

No separate pdf books anymore?

[Kevin Wick]

That's interesting.  I wonder why CA restored the books for OPS/MVS right away, but not the other products.

[Paul Wozniczka]

Hello Kevin,

 

We are creating the individual PDFs when we receive a request, until the PDF functionality is available. This functionality will be available very soon!

[Nancy Lipp]

I just saw this update  - Custom PDFs and ePubs are now available on our DocOps sites!

Create Your Own Custom PDF and ePub Files