With regard to your mention of PDF search capability, have you downloaded and tried the IBM Advanced Linguistic Search Plug-in for searching enabled PDFs and across PDF extended shelves with the same (or nearly same) search quality as BookManager?
PDFs don't give me problems. It's the Info Center stuff that makes me want to chew nails. I have the full Acrobat package and I just index the PDF documents and I'm done. No muss, no fuss and it "just works". Regardless of platform, connectivity or what release of Java I happen to have on the machine in question. Which none of the other formats can claim, BTW. With regard to the information center, the biggest contributing factor to the organization of the content is that the z/VM library is organized using a book methodology and not broken down in such a manner that lends well to article based documentation (the information center is article based). I know those who work on the z/VM documentation are continuously improving the organization of the documentation and have the desire to improve the user experience. Just takes time with so few hands. To be blunt: don't fix it. It ain't broke. Article based docs are inordinately hard to use unless you have the same mental map as the author. I have yet to find anyone else as demented as I, so that's pretty hard to do. Aside from that, there are newer versions of the Eclipse subsystem -- that drives the heart of the information -- that we continuously evaluate and migrated to. These newer versions improve the functionality and speed. None of that will fix a basic disconnect in how people use the docs. It's just lipstick on the pig. This biggest benefit to producing information centers is that the content can be updated much quicker and more easily. If we can round the infrastructure bend then enables that, we might see the end of the days where to use version X release Y of a product one needs to read the release specific documentation, APAR documentation, and possibly a subsequent release documentation (all because updates are not easily made between releases or as service is release to the service stream). Ugh. I WANT release-specific docs. You released it at a point in time, and the docs should apply ONLY to what you released. I don't want to figure out what you've added since you released something - we already have that problem on your other platforms, where the same problems noted above apply. (PERSONAL OPINION) Some exciting functionality I'd like to see in the future involves commenting and user contributed documentation. After all, the users really know the product and what others would look for the most. If you'd like to see a newer implementation of an information center, navigate to the IBM Ration Team Concert information center (http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/rtc/v2r0m0/index.jsp). You'll notice the organization is much different and the load time is less. The last thing I want is other people writing in my manual margins. It's hard enough figuring out what YOU meant, let alone random yutzes who we don't know at all and have no way to evaluate whether they know spit or not. User contributed docs are what Redbooks are for, where they get some sane editing and some fact checking done before you put your logo on them. -- db
