Re: 3 ring binders or no?

[Richard Lippincott <rlippinc -at- BEV -dot- ETN -dot- COM>]

Richard Mateosian said that there are two advantages of the change page
method (we were dealing with MIL-STD manuals...)


>you know what hasn't changed,

Ah, but that's what the change bars and little pointing hands are for.


>you can keep unchanged pages that you may have made notes on.

But all the military organizations also have rules that say "Don't write
notes on the tech manual pages.", so in theory there shouldn't be any notes.


I don't think the people who -wrote- the spec are stupid.  The change-page
method goes back many, many years in the military.  Up until as recently as
five or six years ago, it was indeed the most logical method to contain costs
while updating a large tech manual.  What I'm suggesting is that technology
has caught up with the method.  The manpower costs at -our- end outstrip the
printing costs at -their- end (not including the manpower costs of thousands
of soldiers/sailors/airmen inserting change pages.)

We tried to tell the USAF that they'd save money by going to all-revisions.
The guy who made the decision wasn't worried about saving money, or the impact
on the users.  He knew that if he went to -his- boss and said he'd approved
"all revisions", he'd get shot down.  There were people at the depots who were
so deeply intrenched in the old methods, they could not understand that there
might be a new, better, cheaper way to get the results.

"Were"???  Why on earth did I use the past tense in that last sentence.

Rick Lippincott
Eaton Semiconductor
rlippinc -at- bev -dot- etn -dot- com