I really love the printed manuals. I hope they continue to be offered
in the present format.
PDF versions would be fine but not if the hard copy option is lost or
becomes prohibitively expensive.
I _hate_ when companies only provide PDFs when the manuals are
substantive and readable. For some software companies, when the manual
is a quick read, PDFs are a great idea to offer in lieu of printed
matter.
So I vote against Stata PDFs if it jeopardizes the hard copies or
Stata's business interests, but not otherwise.
Stata 8 looks to be much improved! I look forward to upgrading. Nice
work Stata folks! [For those features not in Stata 8, we should
remember that Stata 8.x is now in the works. I hope ODBC is offered
eventually on platforms other than Windows--on OS X a workaround might
be Excel 10.1 which offers some ODBC features.]
