Sometimes it seems easier to read a hard copy of a document rather than trying to read it on your computer screen. However, some "documents", such as the Macintosh Apple Guide, are designed as online help systems. They were not designed to be printed on paper.

There is no way to print Apple Guides. They have no menu items associated with them because they exist in a floating palette that is independent of the frontmost application and its menu bar. That is, you can switch applications and the Guide stays on the top layer even though the menubar and application context has changed. Guides function this way so they can lead you through steps that may involve switching between multiple applications and can always be the topmost window.

You would not really want to print an Apple Guide tutorial file, since they are context-sensitive databases. Guide sequences are really tree structures describing different actions to take with several branch paths depending on the current environment. You may notice that a Guide may not lead you through the same steps to perform an action every time. This is because it detects that, maybe today, you already have the Apple Menu Items folder or Control Panels folder open and it will skip the associated steps telling you to open that folder. So one user may see a different set of steps than another user for the same action sequence.

If you were able to print the branches of the tree sequence linearly, then each page would have to tell you which page to turn to next, since many times it would not be the following page. This would not be an easy book to follow. The advantage of the Guide is that it can do this jumping for you and even skip the pages you do not need to see.

There are five classes of Guide files: Tutorial, Help, About, Shortcut Guides and Other Guide files. Tutorial, Help, and Other Guide files do not lend themselves to printing as described above. About and Shortcut Guides are simpler cases where each page is usually a stand alone piece of information with no action sequencing. These Guides usually contain a small number of Guide Panels. An About Guide might have one or two pages and a Shortcut Guide might have six to twelve pages. You could take screen shots of these types of Guides using Command-Shift-3 and open, edit and print the captured PICT files.

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