RISC OS User Guide PDF

which ultimately costs around twice what I’d pay Lulu,

There doesn’t seem to be any clear guidance on Lulu regarding printing works that are not your own – so I have contacted them to ask about printing the TI TMS320DM320 reference manual. At 571p + 219p + 282p, I reckon I ought to get the cheapest version of it printed at around €20 which is quite a bit less than it would cost to buy a laser printer, two reams of paper, and a replacement toner cartridge (which can cost more than the printer itself!).
I’ll have to see what their policy is regarding one-offs for personal use. If that works out, it might be nice to have a hardcopy of PRM 5a, as I’ve never actually read it properly. I find PDFs are great for having as an accessible reference (and to that end, this documentation is on my computer, the iPad, the phone…) but they suck for “just reading”. That’s why the ARM ARM that I have on my devices describes ARMv7, while the one that I have actually read parts of is a big tome describing… what was it, ARMv5? Paper is just better.

But, then, I guess there are not so many people in the world who would choose to sit in a hammock under trees on a warm sunny day reading about how the MMU works. ;-)

There doesn’t seem to be any clear guidance on Lulu regarding printing works that are not your own

Not explicitly, although there is a field for author name when you’re setting up a book, which would imply that it’s changeable. Good luck; I seem to recall that you’ve been trying to print that manual for some time!

Paper is just better.

Paper manuals and such have that innate human quality – just try tagging pages with a post-it note on a Kindle or indeed as mentioned earlier drawing on the manual.

As you say “PDFs are great for having as an accessible reference” in that searches for specific text is way faster. Then you can flick to the right groups of pages in the paper copy and tag them with post-its…

sit in a hammock under trees on a warm sunny day

It’s raining. That fine misty stuff that soaks the cats through (except the black one. Takes a thunderstorm to wet her)

I’ll have to see what their policy is regarding one-offs for personal use.

Not sure I understand. There are no set-up costs (which makes them good for one-off drafts, but less good for a larger print run) and each copy you order is what you pay for, plus rather high post and packing charges. They are an American company so I’m not sure they have a policy about anything.

Not sure I understand.

It is simple: I did not write it, I do not hold copyright on the content. Are they willing to print that for personal use of will I need specific written authorisation from the copyright holder (which is never going to happen)?

I’ll have to see what their policy is regarding one-offs for personal use.

Not sure I understand.

I know you struggle with copyright matters, Chris, so I appreciate that this might not have occurred to you. The issue is that Lulu are unlikely to be too chuffed at you printing other people’s work via their site, even if it’s a one-off for personal use, unless you have explicit permission to do it. In fact, their Ts & Cs state that:

You represent, warrant and covenant that (i) you own or otherwise possess all necessary rights with respect to your Content, (ii) your Content does not and will not infringe, misappropriate, use or disclose without authorization, or otherwise violate any intellectual property or proprietary right of any third party […] (iii) at Lulu’s request, and without further consideration, you will promptly provide Lulu with reasonable evidence of such adequate and enforceable rights of third parties (i.e., consents, approvals, licenses or sublicenses), and agree that Lulu may provide a copy of these Terms to anyone claiming an infringement of copyright/trademark relating to your Content or to law enforcement or other entities as required by law or as Lulu reasonably determines to be necessary to protect its rights or the rights of others

Which seems pretty clear. Then marry that up with the bit found at the top of the second page of the PDF that you’ve just admitted re-mastering and sending off to Lulu for printing:

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in any retrieval system of any nature, without the written permission of the copyright holder and the publisher, application for which shall be made to the publisher.

So unless ROOL have supplied you with a clear licence to send the content off to Lulu and turn it into a book – even if as a one off for your own personal use – I think that you might find that you’ve just violated Lulu’s Ts & Cs (and very possibly ROOL’s licence for the User Guide PDF).

In this case ROOL are probably unlikely to get too upset (although there is a point of precedent that’s potentially at stake). However, if you consider that by your figures we could probably all save a few quid printing the Style Guide and the hopefully soon-to-arrive DDE manuals via your DIY approach and thereby deprive ROOL of a potential income stream, you’re certainly into a legally grey area.

However, if you consider that by your figures we could probably all save a few quid printing the Style Guide and the hopefully soon-to-arrive DDE manuals via your DIY approach and thereby deprive ROOL of a potential income stream, you’re certainly into a legally grey area.

For me this is the primary item.
The wiki information is what we make it, the guides/manuals are heading down that same path in having user based authoring of new material using freely given time for the project. From this I would assume it to be reasonable that an electronic or softcopy of the same material is freely available with limitations on the use.
I think it was previously suggested that the short run print setup was a convenient route for ROOL to go when producing printed copies for sale. I think it was Rick that suggested that as a nice income stream.

It also occurs to me that if ROOL want to produce, for a small cost, a reproduction licence valid for one copy then that too would be a nice income stream.

I hate to wade in sounding negative here. We’ve asked some of you privately a number of times over the past few weeks to cease public discussion on how to print ROOL’s Copyright material, especially with no consideration to remuneration of ROOL.

ROOL are having to do work here, digging up documents, investing the best part of £1000 on DTP tools, authoring, editing and otherwise updating these things, lodging real printed copies with the British Library at our own cost, managing a community-spirited attempt to update the User Guide, etc.

Why are we doing this?

1. to bring as many of the old Acorn books up to date as we can
2. to provide printed copies
3. to make some slender profits on the side which we can plough back into RISC OS work

We are also concerned about maintaining quality across all of these publications – getting the dimensions, paper weight, print quality, etc. exactly right. This is important if these books are to stand the test of time and work well together as a collection.

We are not in the business of doing all this work so that people can start running off their own prints for no obvious reason other than to deprive the RISC OS community of what is effectively a token donation (that’s what ROOL’s profits amount to).

We’ve asked some of you privately a number of times over the past few weeks to cease public discussion on how to print ROOL’s Copyright material, especially with no consideration to remuneration of ROOL.

Hence my comment.
My opinion: someone wants a hardcopy, they pay ROOL.
BTW. I’d refer to it as a small trading surplus rather than profit.

We’ve asked some of you privately a number of times over the past few weeks to cease public discussion on how to print ROOL’s Copyright material,

FWIW, the PRM 5a I mentioned as a “possibility” is one I downloaded from ROLtd’s “Private” area ages ago when it was active. As you say, getting this stuff sorted out so it is up to date and in a format more suitable for printing takes time and effort so it would not be nice to go and make hardcopies of ROOL material without consideration to ROOL.

I have no intention of printing ROOL material. I hope that, in time, the documentation will be updated to reflect the current situation (namely, what’s taken place in the last <cough> twenty years </cough>), with the content of PRM 5 merged into the relevant places of the other books; along with discarding the outdated stuff like the details of how the older MEMC style Archimedes operated.
But, as anybody with an iota of brain can see, it is a MASSIVE job, and you should have no shame in expecting to be able to sell printed versions of these documents. Maybe the PDF versions that I imagine would be included with the DDE should say “Not authorised for reprinting” (or whatever legalese means the same thing) on each page?

I hate to wade in sounding negative here. We’ve asked some of you privately a number of times over the past few weeks to cease public discussion on how to print ROOL’s Copyright material, especially with no consideration to remuneration of ROOL.

Is there any mileage in including a “watermark” in the PDFs freely available? That could be arranged to not appear in ‘licensed’ versions.

RISC OS people are generally fairly honest!

Is there any mileage in including a “watermark” in the PDFs freely available?

Good call.
The PDF would need testing on !PDF and other readers though.¹

I’ve seen PDF’s done like that so they are only readable in softcopy and not printable, but unfortunately some readers brought the watermark to the front as a slab which obscured most of the content.

¹ Minor inconvenience for us to test on various readers. Minimal effort to set the PDF generator to mark the file. Thereafter it’s all “automated”.

ROOL’s wish to mobilise this community into helping update the User Guide is clear. Steve Revill has posted links to the Acorn RISC OS 3.7 User Guide and to a copy which, after regular updates, will grow to become the ROOL RISC OS User Guide. He has also pointed us to a descriptive page in the ROOL Wiki, and I have now added some Wiki pages to take this suggestion a step further. Steve asks me to describe them here.

On Wiki page Software information: User Guide there is his advice about filing updates, plus now a link to Wiki page User Guide update submissions. Here there is a preliminary list of the topics to be found in the User Guide’s chapters, each of which can link to a Wiki page (when created) defining changes from the 3.7 starting point for that topic. These Wiki pages are all given category ‘User Guide’ in order to group them.

I have so far made two such pages of proposed changes, SciCalc and Edit, and am about to do the same for Alarm and the Command line (with acknowledgements to Julian Fry and Gavin Wraith respectively).

I hope this approach is relatively self-explanatory, that people who feel like contributing change material will do so, and that improvements to this scheme can be discussed and adopted.

There is a mailing list both for non-Wiki submissions and for editorial advice at mailto:userguide@riscosopen.org; send a mail there to be added to the list, then join the fun!

Excellent. I’ve made some minor updates to the first few chapters but haven’t put these online yet. I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to add each unmodified chapter to the wiki as it appears in the 3.7 guide and then make the edits afterwards: That way the “See changes” link can make it easy to merge the updates back into FrameMaker. Thoughts?

I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to add each unmodified chapter to the wiki as it appears in the 3.7 guide and then make the edits afterwards: That way the “See changes” link can make it easy to merge the updates back into FrameMaker. Thoughts?

I think that rather depends on whether the changes format in the wiki is an easy one to import to FrameMaker.
The ROOL guys are best placed to answer.

add each unmodified chapter to the wiki

My immediate reaction is that that approach would puff up the Wiki rather a lot, and possibly make it harder for the ROOL editors to keep track of changes that they have agreed to and matters of style that they have imposed when folding changes into the master.

Shall we try the scheme as currently devised and approved, and see how we go?

make it harder for the ROOL editors to keep track of changes that they have agreed to and matters of style that they have imposed when folding changes into the master.

That was the aspect I was wondering about. There’s more than enough work in this already without adding to the task list for ROOL. Minimal layout on the submitted text was the remit I believe.

Shall we try the scheme as currently devised and approved, and see how we go?

Iterative development :)

Chapter 4 (Managing the desktop) doesn’t appear to need many changes, in fact the only one I’ve noticed myself is that “Exit” in the Task Manager’s menu is now called “Exit desktop”. However, on my Pi, this kills the desktop but doesn’t display the command line. Is it supposed to? If it works on other systems then it should stay in the manual, and if not then it should go :)

Another question: The Style Guide says that developers can assume that everyone has at least 4 MB of RAM; can we therefore get rid of stuff like “If you have a 2MB computer…” on page 68?

Edit: One more for good measure: Chapter 2, “Changing the computer’s configuration”, suggests saving a Configure file before making changes. This functionality appears to be gone, but there’s a menu option for “CMOS/Save” and “CMOS/Load”. Does that actually save to the CMOS, or does it just mean “save the CMOS settings” (to a file)? Selecting Save doesn’t prompt me to drag a file, and Load freezes my Pi, so it’s a bit hard to know what this is doing! [Update: I suppose in a pinch I could read the help file, which states that it saves to a file. After a little investigation, it’s saved to Choices.]

Printing and/or photocopying a work for your own private use is usually allowed in most countries. If you make PDFs availabe for free download, you have to live with the fact that people are allowed to print their own private copy (as well as e.g. making private backups of the PDF).

It gets more complicated (and usually illegal) if you print/copy for other people. It gets most definitely illegal if you sell those copies.

If you want to clearly signal that even private printing is something you as the copyright holder does not want, just mark the PDF as non-printable.

Printing and/or photocopying a work for your own private use is usually allowed in most countries. If you make PDFs availabe for free download, you have to live with the fact that people are allowed to print their own private copy (as well as e.g. making private backups of the PDF).

Exactly my view. Printing for other people or for sale would be completely unacceptable.

In the UK things are quite strict, the best practical advise I found is here Library Copyright Guidance: Photocopying Library Material

The important bit in this case is:

"The proportion of the work that is photocopied must not be “unfair” in terms of its impact on the copyright owner. There are no defined limits, but the amount that may be copied is usually accepted to be:

One complete chapter or extracts of up to 5% of a book. …"

Printing and/or photocopying a work for your own private use is usually allowed in most countries.

Are you sure that’s not just Germany’s more liberal approach to these sorts of things? ;-)

Good luck; I seem to recall that you’ve been trying to print that manual for some time!

Lulu got back and said that if I was not the copyright holder of the material to be printed, I would need the explicit permission of the copyright holder in order for them to do the print.
This, I guess, also nixes the idea some might have of individuals running off their own copies of ROOL documents…which ought to help Mr. Revill sleep a little better. :-)

As for the DM320 documentation… sod it. Life’s too short to waste any more time considering an attempt to port RISC OS to an old, obscure, ARM9 device anyway. I was only interested in doing it “for the lulz”. No big loss.

They are an American company so I’m not sure they have a policy about anything.

<facepalm>

This would be the same “America” trying to foist on us a set of rules that effectively mean American corporations can sue (and potentially overrule) governments of sovereign states. All to be discussed and dealt with behind closed doors (which is why the only time most people will hear about this is when the odd scrap or two turns up on wikileaks and it makes the media). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership
For those on the pacific side: https://wikileaks.org/Second-release-of-secret-Trans.html and it looks to be ‘hot’ enough that wikileaks recently (like, two weeks ago) posted a $100,000¹ bounty on receiving the text of the trans-pacific agreement (https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-issues-call-for-100-000.html) which ought to give you the heebeejeebees as to what the hell is going on.

This would be the same “America” that continually buggers around with copyright terms just to keep that damned mouse earning a crust. http://artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/ Whether or not any of this has any relevance in Europe is unknown. Technically, the mouse has probably fallen out of copyright here. Technically, also, American law appears to think that American law applies everywhere (https://www.brennancenter.org/legal-work/microsoft-ireland-case-amicus-brief – a “district judge” instructed Microsoft to turn over data held on servers in Ireland; the position of the US appears to be “if you have any sort of presence in the US then US law applies” regardless of whether or not the data is held on servers in another sovereign nation).

This would be the same “America” that decided that something published on-line (in Europe) was “American” by virtue of being posted on-line; was heard in America, and it was decided that the non-American production had failed to register for copyright in the United States (despite the Berne Convention, accepted by everywhere that is not America, specifically prohibiting the need for registration for copyright to be effective). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbaland_plagiarism_controversy#Court_proceedings

Need anybody mention the MPAA and RIAA, often pejoratively referred to as “MAFIAA” (for Music And Film Industry Association of America).

So… Yeah. I think we can figure that the average American company that deals with objects incorporating “intellectual property” rights would actually (surprise surprise) have some sort of a policy on copyright.

Or, the tl;dr version: Duh. :-P

¹ Not that I exactly believe that they have 100K sitting around.

Apart from myself, Steve Revill and CJE, there have been some twenty contributors to this thread variously talking about copyright or about methods for creating an up to date RISC OS User Guide. I have at least ten more names who earlier offered to help CJE recreate a Welcome Guide or User Guide, and I will be writing to them to see if any are still interested and willing to support ROOL’s project. Together there really could be enough talent to push this endeavour forward. Who’s willing?

I’ve just put a rough draft of the “Configuration” page in the wiki. I’m not entirely happy with it, but it looks like I’m going to be very busy over the next couple of weeks so I wanted to share what I have so far.

PS. I tried to join the mailing list but it either didn’t work or is a manual process. I’m guessing the latter…

Welcome Chris M to the detailed part of the project. I too am a bit out of circulation for a week or so, but will be making updates soon, as well as looking at your Configuration draft.

I think the very specific rules for the submission of screen shots are now complete on Wiki page Software information: User Guide, so we can add images as appropriate. Note that you can define and upload an image, but you have to email the Editor with any updated replacements.