FR: Put the Resolve manual online for search engines

There have been many requests to make an online version of the manual.
This is NOT one of those requests.
Rather - just please BMD would you host it somewhere where search engine crawlers are allowed to see it so we can google things in it?

I'm amazed it's hidden from the search engines.

This is extremely low-hanging fruit.

[BMD Web Engineering]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your request, we understand and feel your frustration.

Unfortunately there is no simple answer for this one.

The manual is available to and it's location published to Google in our site manifest to make sure that Googlebot can find it.
We do not stop Google from indexing it.

Google has a limitation on the size of PDF documents it indexes. The DaVinci Manual exceeds this size and hence does not get included in a Google search (since Resolve 15).
Many of the competing search engines use the Google seach index metadata and similarly do not find the manual for this reason.

A possible solution is for the manual to be broken into sections contained in smaller files that can be indexed by the search engines; this however would require multliple downloads to fetch the complete manual if it is to be available to Google to index i.e. it can't be broken up and then zipped into a single download for users to download.


Regards,
Martin

Google has a limitation on the size of PDF documents it indexes. The DaVinci Manual exceeds this size and hence does not get included in a Google search (since Resolve 15).
Many of the competing search engines use the Google seach index metadata and similarly do not find the manual for this reason. A possible solution is for the manual to be broken into sections contained in smaller files that can be indexed by the search engines; this however would require multliple downloads to fetch the complete manual if it is to be available to Google to index i.e. it can't be broken up and then zipped into a single download for users to download.

Two suggestions:

1) what if you created a standalone HTML version of the document and just turn it in a virtual website? It can be done, depending on how the original document was formatted. If it's in inDesign, I believe there's a way to export as HTML web pages directly. (What I'm not sure of is how graphics are handled.)

2) You could always have two sets of documents for the Resolve manual: one broken up into multiple documents (on a website, viewable), and then the entire 4204-page single document as one download.

This manual thing was discussed many times in different threads.
Yes, an html version should be available... online, and offline.

For the online one, it should have a proper search function too.

https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio-le ... ne-manual/

I'm sure the Resolve manual is the best ressource for... Resolve. But I personally never open it, never.
PDF manuals are a pain to use. It's good that they exist and everything is in one place (just in case), but other than that, it's too archaïque imo.

I even prefer real paper for manuals. I'll always reach for the paper one if it's not hidden in a box stored I don't know where.

The "middle ground" between paper and a pdf for me was always HTML. It's almost as if HTML was invented displaying information easiest and fastest way possible lol. Pure text, images, bullet points.
Add to that a proper database that has all the content indexed properly (things already possible more than 25 years ago with basic php/asp/mysql/etc).

Glad this is being discussed and that someone from BMD is chiming in.

The pdf manual is also sorely lacking in links. So many places where it says things like “see chapter 17: media management” but the text isn’t linked. Plus the table of contents isn’t formatted in a way to see chapter 17 anyway.