Manuals as PDF

[Javier]

Hi there!

 

I am a brand new user of Waveforms and Analog Discovery 2 hardware.

 

I see a lot of online resources at digilent.com to learn, but cannot find how to download as PDF the following manuals:

 

Analog Discovery 2 -> Getting started, Rerence Manual, etc.

Waveforms -> Getting started, Rerence Manual, etc.

 

I need them since many times I have no internet connection in the lab I am using them.

 

Thanks so much in advance!

 

Best, 

 

 

 

[artvvb]

Hi @Javier, welcome to the forums!

Unfortunately, we don't currently provide PDF downloads for most of our online documentation, but it's something we're considering, and your feedback is appreciated. You can also find a lot of in-app documentation in your WaveForms installation, either in the Help tab that pops up when you first launch the app, or in the Help -> Browse menu, see the screenshots below.

Thanks,

Arthur

[D@n]

@artvvb,

I would also ask Digilent to post and maintain PDF copies of all of their manuals.

It is common for hardware to outlive its support, or for newer versions of hardware to have newer documents that then get confused with the manuals for older products.  My solution to this has always been to download the PDF manual of the user guides or other spec sheets at the time of purchase, to guarantee that 1) I won't get confused by an update to a product I don't have later, and 2) I'll still be able to keep and maintain the manual long after the company that built the product has stopped supporting it.

Thanks!

Dan

[zygot]

I agree with the notion that keeping copies of documentation with projects is important. What's worse than no PDF? A PDF with errors and misinformation, and boy, Digilent has had their share of those. I'm not picking on Digilent because I've never worked at a place where documentation was up to date, always correct, and readily available. Same for vendor tools and products. Same for stuff that I've created... Digilent isn't the best at providing documentation, but certainly isn't the worst. Some FPGA board vendors don't supply even a minimum.. to the point where they aren't going to sell me anything. Altera documentation used to be pretty good.. but those days are long gone. Xilinx documentation has always been pretty bad, but if anything there's been some improvement over the years.

Ultimately, documentation, like valid constraints files, are living things that have to change with board revisions and part swapping for a production of product when a part on the original BOM isn't available, and in a meaningful time frame. It's a big problem.. for everyone... and there's no perfect solution. Heck, I keep notes on everything that happens during a project development cycle and even those notes sometimes have errors. I've been around the merry-go-round more times than I care to acknowledge and the scenery never changes.

Quite a while ago Xilinx stopped supplying PDF documents. They do have the Document Navigator that keep a catalog of document versions related to tool versions. While I hated this at first, I've come to see it as a positive step. Now, if they could just get those version specific documents accurate and meaningful. As I mentioned.. it's a big problem. I'm sympathetic to document providers everywhere.

These days most browsers can create PDF versions of HTML pages, unless they specifically are written in a way to not work with browser page printing software. Digilent has never produced a PDF of the Genesys2 reference manual ( to my knowledge ) but I still have a PDF included in the /doc folder of all of my Genesys2 projects courtesy of Firefox. So, perhaps asking for PDFs isn't wxactly what we want. Perhaps, what we want is on-line documentation that can be turned into a PDF with any commonly used browser. (Yeah I know that I'm a hold-out with respect to Firefox ).

I feel more comfortable mentioning what I don't want.

I don't want documentation in a form that can have hidden malware embedded in it.
I don't want documentation that tells me stuff that isn't accurate or relevant
I don't want to go online to use a product because there's no way to create viewable documentation ( generally in the form of a PDF ) that I can use off-line. 90% of what I do is on a PC that's not connected to the internet ever, much less all day while I'm working.

I'm sure that there's more to what I don't want... but this is a good start.

[edit] Oh, last complication to the topic that I forgot to mention. Adobe won't like it but the term 'pdf' has become the 'xerox' of the past. These days there are multiple products that create pdfs and even more that render pdfs. Browsers, like the on in Firefox, may not render a pdf the same way as a different browser does. I've seen this. As wonderful as the pdf format is, it's not perfect or even necessarily consistent. Edited March 28, 2023 by zygot

[artvvb]

The feedback is really appreciated.

We found a plugin for the wiki system the documentation site runs on that will allow for PDF download, which has since been installed. There are some incompatibilities with other plugins and some other issues on the site which cause problems in the exported files, but we should be able to fix things up over time. The photo galleries at the top of many manuals are a particular offender, along with mathematical formulas, and some other missing figures here and there.

What this means is that it's currently possible to download any page as a PDF by appending "?do=export_pdf" to the URL. As mentioned above, results will be mixed, but the baseline capability is currently there, and we're looking to keep improving on it. - Edit, and we should be able to add download buttons to individual pages once we're confident that the results for those pages are good.

Thanks!

Arthur