How to get a copy of the Labview manual

[johntrich1971]

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@altenbach wrote:

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@lagelian wrote:

We have prioritized fixing the PDF failure bug. The LabVIEW help is by far our largest manual with 96K+ individual topics so it has been a challenge for PDF generation.

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One would think that you could generate that "manual" once offline and then maybe repeat every months or so (or whenever significant changes happen) and cache it for quick downloading. I am not sure how 96k+ entries translates into megabytes. How big would the resulting pdf be?

Another option would be to just remove that menu entry. It does not seem reasonable to even offer that. 😄 (Unless somebody plans to read it while doing a month-long survival training in the Alaskan wilderness, the online resources seem sufficient.)

The time of printed manuals are over!

In contrast, 25+ years ago LabVIEW shipped with a bookshelf worth of manuals. 😄

 

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I remember those. I also remember getting LabVIEW with a stack of 3.5" disks (OK, giving a hint to my age here, LOL).

[KMitch81]

I also remember getting software with a stack of 8 inch floppies.  Back in the day they really were floppy.

[johntrich1971]

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@KMitch81 wrote:

I also remember getting software with a stack of 8 inch floppies.  Back in the day they really were floppy.

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I don't remember 8" floppies, but definitely had a lot of software on 5 1/4" floppies (and yes, they definitely were floppy). 

[Mark_Yedinak]

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@johntrich1971 wrote:

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@KMitch81 wrote:

I also remember getting software with a stack of 8 inch floppies.  Back in the day they really were floppy.

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I don't remember 8" floppies, but definitely had a lot of software on 5 1/4" floppies (and yes, they definitely were floppy). 

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I remember 8" floppies for the PDP-11. Never for a PC.

[Les__Bartel]

Download does not work today. After 30 seconds I get a timeout message.

[Bob_Schor]

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@Mark_Yedinak wrote:

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@johntrich1971 wrote:

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@KMitch81 wrote:

I also remember getting software with a stack of 8 inch floppies.  Back in the day they really were floppy.

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I don't remember 8" floppies, but definitely had a lot of software on 5 1/4" floppies (and yes, they definitely were floppy). 

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I remember 8" floppies for the PDP-11. Never for a PC.

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Same here!  Did you run RT-11, RSX, RSTS, or TSX-Plus?  (I think I'm the Last Known Chair of the RT-11/TSX+ SIG and a member of the DAARC SIG (which stands for "Data Acquisition, Analysis, Real-Time, and CIM" -- except for that last set of initials, and the fact that it was all text, there's an interesting overlap in "mission" with a Laboratory for Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench).

Bob Schor

[alexderjuengere]

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@ESearl wrote:

I think this is a bug because the LabVIEW manual is just so large. I can download the entire manual as a PDF for other smaller manuals on ni.com/docs. I can also download the LabVIEW Fundamentals "Selected Section and Subsections(s)" which yields a pretty large PDF on its own.

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I know this kind of conduct from gitlab or github, when the file size is exceeding a certain limit

[WNM]

My first RT-11 system was on a PDP-11 that used DECTAPE and FORTRAN.  I thought the world couldn't get much better when we moved to 8" floppies and LSI-11's. Then the 8" floppies became double density and double sided and eventually we managed to acquire HDDs that had a few 10's of megabytes.  Eventually TSX+ came out and that was wonderful too when paired with a 128Mb (256?) memory card. A little while later (after having setup a VAX 785) I moved on to MicroVAXes and VMS.  Apple-II's had be out a little while and this was about the time that the first Macintoshes were coming out. IBM Personal PCs with DOS had been around for a little while but the Macs were what everyone wanted. Not too much later Microsoft was formed. It hired many of the DEC software engineers and Windows was born on the ashes of VMS.  It amazing how far we have come.

[softball]

Hi

LabVIEW has gone through several evolutions.

But for an old-school basic LabVIEW introduction you can still find a genuine LabVIEW User Manual issued by NI by googling :

https://electrical.engineering.unt.edu/sites/default/files/NI_LabVIEW.pdf

It is very old, but 349 pages of well organized text is much better than the new web based manual you can download as an ugly PDF file.

For one-stop overviews of newer features, like the Event Structure or the Actor Framework, you will have to buy books.

Otherwise maybe start here :

https://labviewwiki.org/wiki/Home

Regards

[rolfk]

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@softball wrote:

Hi

LabVIEW has gone through several evolutions.

But for an old-school basic LabVIEW introduction you can still find a genuine LabVIEW User Manual issued by NI by googling :

https://electrical.engineering.unt.edu/sites/default/files/NI_LabVIEW.pdf

It is very old, but 349 pages of well organized text is much better than the new web based manual you can download as an ugly PDF file.

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Yes, I loved the format of those manuals. They were not always easy to navigate simply because of the sheer amount of information in them, but there were actually very in-depth explanations about all sorts of things including mathematical formulas of what was actually implemented in the Analysis Library, for instance.

I used to have the entire stack of manuals, including manuals for various toolkits, as it was shipped around LabVIEW 4 or 5 times, but unfortunately got rid of them at some point because of space concerns and thinking they were not relevant anymore. Big mistake! The modern web based documents and their PDF generated output are so much harder to read and you would think that at least searching is much easier but unfortunately the search index is about as poor as on the NI website, so pretty much unusable. I understand that we would likely not have any Amazon Rainforest anymore if all the LabVIEW manuals were still printed in the last 25 years, but the web based format is definitely not just a blessing.