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>I am about to plan a printed manual for the first time in
>about six years. I also plan to deliver in pdf. My questions
>are these:
>
>*Has anybody reset the margins between paper and pdf versions
>of a manual so that the print version is 7 x 9 or thereabouts
>and the pdf is full page and printer friendly? Are users
>accepting of a tactic like this or do the discrepancies in
>page numbers befuddle them? Is this worth thinking about, or
>more of a PITA than it's worth?
More of a PITA than it's worth. If the page is 7x9 and it prints out on 8.5x11 or A4 with some extra white space, that's about what most people expect. They know they're printing out a PDF of something that was meant to be printed and bound and they won't hold it against you IME.
>
>*Has anybody abandoned the roman-numerals-for-frontmatter
>routine and actually started a manual on --what???-- page 5
>or so -- so that the page numbers (which, in this case would
>be continuous) match the page numbers that Acrobat reader
>displays?
Please don't do this. Acrobat now happily displays page numbers that match real page numbers, lowercase roman frontmatter and all. This is automatic with the PDFMaker Word macro, but it can be managed easily in the Acrobat interface otherwise, with Document > Number Pages IIRC.
>
>And Dick M. -- WTF is a tip-in??? Inquiring minds wanna know!
>;-)
A tip-in is a sheet that is manually glued to another page. We used to see a lot of art books that consisted of text printed on some luxuriously velvety uncoated stock, with the art reproductions printed on a 12-color press on coated stock, then cut to size and glued onto the text pages. Not done much anymore. Sometimes, though, you see full-page tip-ins, such as a frontispiece of some sort.
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