Well the online help is lame and not much use for a reader like myself who likes to scan and skim-read when searching for information. You would think coders would know how important this is, but for some reason certain developers decide they want to make things ‘easier’ then in fact make things harder.
I am not even going to mention a print version of the manual. Ha… 
Completely agree there should be at least a 2nd help link pointing to a local help file as in the past.
It seems to be this file on my computer that points to the English online help:
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 9\Help\help-redirect\help-redirect-EN.html
EDIT
I have just managed to get this working by changing the help file url pointer in:
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 9\Help\help-urls.xml
to the offline PDF file which now opens up in a browser tab. Much better.
It would be nice to see a second link in the help menu. But I will say, though I do like visually scanning through the manual, searching is much better using the online help docs. You can also use Google to find things.
That said, here’s a cludgy solution, and the results depend on your browser settings. And to actually do it requires some specialized knowledge. (I can’t help with that 
)
Change the contents of the file dickiedrummer mentioned.
Change the first url that appears in the file to “C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 9\Documentation\Operation_Manual.pdf”
“Cludgy” that’s a nice word 
Well it may be so, but it’s much better than working with the online file for me. Anybody making the change, (I did exactly as you described) should of course backup the original file first in case of any mistakes!
Can I just say, it can be a little fiddly.
Http:// has to be replaced with file:/// and have to be in " "
If you open the Operation_Manual.pdf in your browser, and copy the URL, then paste it replacing the URL in the help-redirect-EN.html (or whatever language you use) remember the " "
Here is how it looks on my system:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Steinberg.help: Are you offline?</title>
<script lang="javascript">
function init ()
{
var queryString;
if (navigator.onLine)
queryString = "file:///C:/Program%20Files/Steinberg/Cubase%209/Documentation/Operation_Manual.pdf"
else
queryString = "offline.html"
window.document.location = queryString;
}
</script>
</head>
<body onLoad="init();">
</body>
</html>
It looks like you made your change to the file:
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 9\Help\help-redirect\help-redirect-EN.html
but I finished up making a change to line 61 in the file:
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 9\Help\help-urls.xml
So from line 59 in that file it now looks like this:
Cubase Help file://Documentation/Operation_Manual.pdfwhich then opens the offline manual in a browser window.
[/quote]I like to yellow highlight and type clarifying notes in the .pdf files. That’s out the window with on-line-only help.
Remember the.pdf help file you reference on your desktop will one day let you down when the on-line manual changes after they decide to stop updating the.pdf.
“My crystal ball sees a future version of Cubase where there’s no pdf documentation available at all.”
I hope your crystal ball breaks forever. This change is so unbelievably inconvenient and just reeks of developers who don’t actually use their own program or are not musicians/composers and don’t have any concept of the workflow of the average Cubase user. I’ve used Cubase for a decade now and f1 has always opened up the manual nice and easy when I have a specific problem or question to address. I shouldn’t have to dig around on my desktop to open a pdf externally or god forbid be linked to a useless website when my internet may or may not even be working.
The web version is much better for searching, and you can keep it open on your phone to quickly check things. This is the closest you will get to having a physical paper version of the manual again.
One example use is keeping the list of default key commands open. You can check it without alt-tabbing or moving your mouse, which makes it much easier to remember what exactly you were doing.
+1
Build a proper context help like PT and many other have.
User experience will be enhanced by magnitudes.
Devs do a little gui thing there and try make a big thing from that - look what we did, now you have a button to open sidebars!
But leave major flaws like context help behind.
+1 for context help (which they used to have years ago). But I still like the PDF version because I can search through quicker. Although most help info I get now comes from a web search and I dive into either forums or videos
Mike.
Gotta add my two cents here too! When viewing the PDF, I get a relatively powerful search engine in Adobe acrobat. The online Cubase help search engine is TERRIBLE!!! If I look for the word "Tempo? I do NOT want 500 documents I have to sort through! I want to be able to quickly skip through ever instance the word shows up in the doc till I find the section I’m looking for!
Excellent point.
If you want many links to pdf files in the help menu :
in the file “help-urls.xml” (help directory of cubase)
Thanks dasoft, that worked nicely! I did need to download MS XML Notepad; using Notepad or Wordpad didn’t let me save it properly.
Here’s the link if anyone else wants to try:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7973
Also you can reprogram the F1 shot cut to the local PDF Offline Help file