About Manual Maker

©James W. Walker, 1996

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 Manual Reader requires System 7, and require AppleScript if you want to print.

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.