Please use B&W text in documentation

[waclawek.jan]

In some newer STM32 documents, such as ES0418, text is rendered in various tints of blue. This results in decreased readability and problems when printing.

Can ST please constrain fancy color schemes to marketing material, and use conservative black-on-white in the technical documents.

Please do communicate this across management levels who may not be aware of real users' needs.

Thanks,

Jan Waclawek

PS. Other users, if agree, please add a "+1" reply

[AvaTar]

I wholeheartedly agree.

Consider business users (engineers), who use to print pages on department printers. Those are usually set to automatically convert color to B&W. Have you ever checked what then remains of the fancy formatting ?

[Imen.D]

Hello,

Thanks for your feedback and contribution.

The new template for technical documentation was chosen with the objective of using color to obtain a more modern look-and-feel. 

If it is only a printing issue, you can print in grayscale.  

Thanks for your understanding!

Kind Regards,

Imen

[Bob S]

That shade of blue that ST chose is difficult to read ON THE SCREEN, not just when printed. It lacks contrast with the white background. Low contrast == hard to read for anyone with less than perfect eyesight. Specifically, in ES0418, table 3 is quite difficult for me to read. The entire text in the table is blue. This is the most important table in the document (it is basically the table of contents). The blue for section numbers and table numbers, while less than idea, is at least tolerable.

As @Community member​ said, this is technical documentation not sales brochures. Making it absolutely clear and easily legible should be the highest priority. I don't need or want "slick and glossy".

[waclawek.jan]

No, Imen, it's not about our understanding, it's ST's lack of understanding of basic principles we are talking about here.

The "more modern look and feel" is absolutely irrelevant when it comes to technical documentation.

And telling us to learn how to print means that you put obstacles to us and then require we invent ways how to circumvent them. Is this ST's idea of support?

As I've said, I believe that this may be difficult to understand for the managerial types, that's why I invite them to come here to discuss this publicly under their own name/nick and stop hiding behind the Moderators.

Jan

[AvaTar]

Proper documentation as I know it uses explicit symbols to mark specific contexts, which do not get lost in B&W printing like fancy color shades.

Take operation manuals for electronic device (like a TV) as example. It is used to work with, not to impress.

[jaromir sukuba]

+1

[Tomas Hamouz]

+1

[OKozu]

+1

[Andreas Bolsch]

+1

[CHowa]

Agreed. Please keep "more modern look and feel" out of technical docs. Or are you going to start using emojis too?

"Print in grayscale" is not helpful -- it results in lower contrast!

[waclawek.jan]

Besides the "modern feel and look" which just unnecessarily gets into way, now the devboards (Nuclei, Discos) documents started to bloat to several tens of megabytes, e.g. DB2196 - Rev 13 has 24 megabytes and only 7 pages (i.e. maybe around 10kB of text). This is probably due to the unnecessarily huge embedded picture of the board, 3880 x 4625 Pixels (17.94 MPixels), which is absolutely unnecessary for this document.

ST, can you please apply some reasonable sanity when creating technical documentation?

Please use modern feel and look and bloated pictures only in the marketing material.

Can whomever is responsible at ST for the decision to use "modern feel and look" in the technical documentation, please come and discuss here under her/his own name, so that she/he can directly exchange opinions with the real users of those documents?

JW

@Imen DAHMEN​ 

[Tesla DeLorean]

https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/stm32h747zi.pdf

See Figure 16 form SMPS step-down converter

Hard to focus on, the darn thing has a drop-shadow on the diagram, WTF