Pet Peeve: Vendor Documentation Naming Conventions - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Sal Ammoniac
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 04:48:28 pm
content: Why do vendors name documents something like 61105F.pdf rather than Timers.pdf, which reflects the content of the documentation? Why do they use these cryptic file names that only mean something to them?Download a bunch of documentation from one of these vendors and you'll end up opening a bunch of them until you find the one you need via trial and error. I usually end up renaming the documents to something sensible, but that's something the vendor should have done from the start.

author: Muxr
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 04:53:12 pm
content: It's their numbering system, and sometimes they refer to those numbers in other documents so it can be useful in tracking down information. Usually what I do is when I save PDFs I append the description of it to the name.

author: zapta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 04:59:16 pm
content: Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on January 29, 2016, 04:48:28 pmIt's an easy way to generate compact and unique document ids.

author: Sal Ammoniac
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2016, 05:01:43 pm
content: Yeah, sure, but why not name the file "Timers-61105F.pdf" rather than just 61105F.pdf?

author: obiwanjacobi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 30, 2016, 06:37:04 am
content: Because they approached the problem from a technical perspective and not from a user perspective.Its easier for the tech (dev) and harder for the user. If you want to make it easier for the user you have to put in more work and that costs more money. I believe this is true for all things.

author: dadler
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 30, 2016, 07:43:02 am
content: The filenames are almost certainly automatically generated by their document management system.However, I would be surprised if they could not configure the software to include some useful text in the filenames--however this data would have to come from somewhere. A human would have to assign it, or some script would have to try to extract a title from the document text.There is good news though! You are allowed to rename the files after downloading them.After downloading app notes etc, I highlight/copy the first bolded title I see in the document body, and rename the file to match that text.

author: matseng
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 30, 2016, 08:12:07 am
content: This is a typical case of where the author/published of a document could have spent a few minutes extra to manually name the document to something relevant instead of having 10000+ readers each spend time renaming the file.Basically the same thing when someone posts about an online meeting/webcast and says that is at 10am CDT and then having all the viewers to manually figure out when that is in their local time. If the author had spent one minute creating a linkhttps://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=My+Webcast&year=&month=&day=&hour=10&min=00&sec=0&p1=104&ah=1and then just posted that as well, possibly shortened, life would much easier for the readers.

author: neslekkim
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 30, 2016, 09:27:05 am
content: Since they take the time to make a list of documents like the reference manual here, it would't take too much more time to name the files also:http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/Devices.aspx?product=PIC24FJ128GB204For some reason, one of the documents have an reasonable name, section 34..

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 30, 2016, 01:29:34 pm
content: Mired in the old 8.3 filename syntax, perhaps?I'm pretty happy with the new Atmel documentation filenames:QuoteUnique numbers, meaningful titles, and even classification!