Good Afternoon Teams,
FRC is excited to partner with Enable Training and Consulting (a Silver Supplier for 2011 and donor of this effort) to present the 2012 manual documentation in a format that we believe is easier for teams to navigate and use. It is a primarily web-based system that allows teams to easily find a specific section or rule. It’s easier to search and jump between sections, and, best of all, it keeps teams from having to download an entire PDF just to read one rule or section.
You can access the new manual format here. You may also still download a PDF or print the Manual so that you don’t have to be connected to the internet to view it.
As with many new components to FRC, we want your feedback. As you test the Online 2012 Administrative Manual and the 2011 Game Manual that we converted to the new format, please let us know if you find anything that needs improving (or anything you like) by posting to the Online Manual section of the Beta test forums.
40 days until Kickoff
See you then!
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11 comments:
This looks like it could be a great improvement however if everything is online will we take down their servers on the day of kickoff? Will their still be a manual available to pre-download so that we can unlock it after the opening ceremony.
Thanks
Administration Manual 4.16:
-- USB stick/drive
is on the same line as
-- Vice grip - large, small
[same section] Also, the right side of the table is cut off for smaller screens (using a netbook)
The first page of a Search doesn't fit in the frame on my screen when running an MacOSx/Firefox 3.6.24 or Win 7/IE 8.
"
Test case in Awards, search for Woodie
Looks good. But I would still rather have the PDF format. It doesn't download all of the pictures on the first page.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Open Codecs 0.85.17777)
:-)
-R
For offline readers, the new manual lacks a central location for collecting all the manual sections, making it laborious to collect the manual.
What I would like is an SVN subversion repository of all the manual sections. In past years, I used "wget" to automatically collect every new revision of the pdf manual pages, which made it easy to both get the changed files, and to see which files were changed. An SVN repository of the manual would be a great addition.
The new manual format looks like it will be advantageous for the online reader, but it is not as easy for archival of all the revisions and not as easy to identify sections that changed since the user last visited.
Is there a way to zoom in without converting to PDF? 10pt font seems to be too small on small laptop screens. I also like to zoom in the pictures, even if they are only representative. I also agree with the previous mention that a home page to download all sections is necessary. I do like that you can skip to various sections with ease. However if you don't know what rule number you are trying to remember you would probably still need to do the same amount of searching as if there was not link. Maybe having the first 5 words of the sentence next to the [Gxx] would help stimulate the memory enough to know which rule was being looked for. Overall I will probably still do the same as always and save a PDF version to my thumb drive, but I can see this being very useful for a team member to look up something quickly.
Too bad the search button is broken.
-R
MI dont know if this will be done later when the rest of the manual will be released but make a complete manual download like the 2011 Game Manual.
Is the "New Manual Format" forum in the first forums the right place to leave comments? It seems weird that a new forum was created, but not mentioned in this post.
http://forums.usfirst.org/forumdisplay.php?f=1540
I am all for change and like the online approach. But I would like to know one thing...has anyone done any load testing on the website that is hosting the manuals? Like everything else, and usfirst.org should know from experience, when the manuals are released the day of kickoff, about what...10,000+ people will hit this server all at once. Will the server live?
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