William Dupont
> I think I would still prefer a hyperlinked pdf version of the paper
> documentation, but a hyperlinked SMCL version would be a
> big advance.
> Would creating hyperlinked pdf documentation be much more
> difficult or
> expensive than doing this in SMCL?
The difficulty or the expense of doing this are not
the issue at all, or so I suspect. It's what would be
done with the resulting product.
Let me put one key facet a little more bluntly than
Stata Corp might.
If your colleagues and students could print out .pdf willy-nilly,
how much would it affect their willingness to buy the manuals?
How many people, world-wide, would buy cheap pirated
versions of (subsets of) the documentation if they existed?
Individually, of course, no one wants to pay any more than
one can avoid, modulo ethical scruples.
Collectively, however, the viability of
Stata Corp must depend on its financial success, itself
dependent on at least some people paying substantially
for what they get.
Nick
[email protected]
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