Most Finale users in Japan don’t have habits of reading thousand-page e-books on their electronic devices (including desktop, laptop, tablet, cellphone, etc). Finale in Japan has the most paperback-textbook resources available; meanwhile, only one book available for Dorico 1.
The Dorico 3 Japanese manual is good enough but is available as free PDF version and online version only. This makes this manual have no arena to convince Finale users through their convenient reading occasions.
Therefore, my strong advice to YAMAHA Japan: please publish the Dorico 3 Japanese manual (or 3.5 if possible) as paperback textbooks and promote them among bookstores (at least your YAMAHA music storefronts) to attract at least new music learners’ eyes, letting them know that they have a better choice and Finale is not the sole answer of music typography.
P.S.: What makes me frustrated the most is that I cannot find a music publishing house in Japan (at least in Tokyo) which allows their staff members to use Dorico. Only Finale is allowed. Others (on my campus) may laugh at me that “learning a better software is useless”. They know nothing about Dorico, and YAMAHA really needs to actively brainwash them.
I was listening to one of the scoring notes podcasts where some composers were reminiscing about what software was allowed in class back in their day. Mostly remembered afterwards as good times though, after pushing forward and in some cases pioneering new techniques and ideas.
I think of all the Windows 2000 or Lotus 123 manuals that used to clutter up shelves for years after. Glad I’m not that book store owner. I feel like today printed technical manuals of any type is a poor business proposition from the shop owners point of view. I can’t speak to Finale user reading habits - but my 79 year old Mom got her first Kindle and I don’t know ANYBODY slower to adopt new things.
I bet more people are convinced by viewing tutorials or reviews on YouTube about features they care about - its a quick investment of time and gives you a more immersive understanding of what the software is actually like to use. I don’t know what languages those are done in… if there isn’t one, you wouldn’t be the first you tuber to make a mark that way about a subject they were passionate about.
The current PDF has only been updated for version 3.0. Very few people would buy a printed manual for an ‘old’ version. Even if the manual were now up-to-date: printing, shipping, distributing, and marketing the book takes time, and as soon as a new version of the software comes along, those books will be worthless.
The current PDF is 1300 pages. That’s going to limit your choice of binding machines, and make it expensive.
It’s more profitable to publish a book on Finale, because it’s the same as it was in 2012.
Some of the user interface is still the same as it was in 1995, let alone 2012. (OK, the icons have more colors now, but that’s about the only difference).
The style of Steinberg manuals currently, and perhaps for the Dorico manual in particular, is to be searchable: the content is deliberately divided into quite small chunks (“topics”) that each contain only the information relevant to a specific task, concept, or dialog/panel etc so that anyone searching online quickly gets to the relevant information. We aim for it to be comprehensive as a reference - and that means, rather big! The formatting of the PDF is automated, using the same single source as for the webhelp, so it can be tricky to tweak individual pages, e.g. to squeeze a picture onto the previous page when it doesn’t quite fit. And the fast development pace of Dorico means that any one manual doesn’t stay static for long.
I am also a big fan of hard-copy books and paper - give me a pad of manuscript and a pencil for the earliest stages of a new composition any day! But I think it’s probably fair to say that, given the factors in the previous paragraph, the official Steinberg Dorico manual is probably not best suited to being printed and published, if the primary intent of that is to introduce Dorico to new users. Perhaps the increasing number of specially-written guides (such as this one) would be the better alternative? (And potentially the ‘First steps’ chapter from the manual that I am rewriting to be more of a comprehensive walkthrough.) The online/PDFs manuals will always be there to answer questions and support users as-and-when they’re needed.
Maybe some time in the far future, you could use an “@media print…” css to format the page for printing. You wouldn’t need the left sidebar with the chapter and verse stuff, just the main information. All of it probably is in a database that creates a web page for each topic, but maybe there could be a database function that formats it a little differently with no page breaks for a section of pages. Just dreamin’ here, easy to do! I certainly wouldn’t want to print the whole thing.
Maybe better is for an aftermarket book written by one of the experts that describes some of the basics. Kinda like Dan Kreider’s except with lots of detail and intended to be printed.
By the way, it’d be nice if Dan’s was easily found. New people don’t know it exists. I know it’s not official Steinberg documentation, but would it be appropriate to have a sticky for resources like his?
Interesting thought, but I doubt it would be at all simple and as we put quite a bit of thought into which information needs a new paragraph etc, I don’t know whether it would be an improvement.
See the link in my earlier comment for a recently published guide to Dorico, published in hard copy.
MI7 (coperated with StyleNote publishing house), the authorized distributor of MakeMusic in Japan, republishes their 500-page Finale Guidebook for every major Finale release. MI7 even localized Finale thoroughly, treating Finale as their own product with their 100% effort. Their Finale guidebook is the only one professional music engraving textbook available in most bookstores in Japan, while the only Dorico textbook available (in around 100 pages, I guess) is for Dorico Pro 1 at this moment in Japan and is seldom offered on the shelf.
I know how hard for you to understand why Dorico manual has to be published in this paperback way. However, if we don’t do this, then we will have absolutely no way to grab attentions from most Finale users in Japan, period.
After my most-recent reply above, here are my words for your point:
If not suited for printing-publishing, then persuade YAMAHA to make the Japanese manual faster.
You people are too far from MI7 (the authorized distributor of MakeMusic in Japan) regarding ensuring the availability of paperback learning resources.
Considering the low information-technology-processing ability of most Finale users in Japan, their first dedicated Dorico book can be much simpler:
Buy a latest Finale Guidebook made by MI7 (cooperated with StyleNote publishing house) and engineer its structure: it just contains hundreds of small tutorials teaching readers to do things one by one, and the entire book is not structurally comprehensive.
Write a similar Dorico textbook in Japanese.
For English users, such kind of textbook may have less value to be made. However, we need to consider the limited learning efficiency of most Finale users. There is a reason why they can only use Finale without being brainwashed (because they are already brainwashed to use Finale by their composition professors, etc.), which means that there are similar things happening in the matter between their ears.
Maybe my comments above are too long. Let me make it short:
If you official people (either from Steinberg or YAMAHA) have done sufficient research in how Finale is stubbornly welcomed in Japan, then you will have same conclusions as what I have. The conclusion itself may sound ridiculous to those who have no awareness to this market in Japan, still.
There are other reasons related to compatibility issues between Dorico-generated PDFs and those printing devices used by music publishing houses in Japan. Though this can be bypassed by using InDesign or Ghostscript, I am afraid that seldom people know this. Similar issues may happen with PDFs generated by recent Finale versions, hence why Finale 2011 is still welcomed in some cases.
There is an alternative explanation: As a Japanese-based company, Yamaha understand very well that trying to un-brainwash people is a waste of time, so they don’t bother to try. By definition, somebody who is brainwashed doesn’t pay any attention to logic or rational arguments!
There is a saying in scientific research that “new ideas get accepted slowly - one funeral at a time”. Maybe the Japanese music publishing industry will progress at the same speed in the same way.
I never forget the hostile glance from my solfege teacher in my 1st year here (who just graduated with master degree in composition major from a famous music conservatory here) when I was trying to recommend Dorico to her. She was taught / instructed / asked by her professor to use Finale, and she absolutely doesn’t want to take a minute to see whether she can have a better choice.
(Solfege classes are mandatory here in this film music college for all 1st-year students 'cause there are lots of freshmen students who just graduated from high school.)
