Is there some ordering of the chapters of the user manuals? competitors use alphabetical order which is great, ST seems to use TRNG ordering, showing off its amazing technology. I was wondering though, can ST help readers instead? they are not impressed

[LCE]

Although it is a good one (TRNG 😂 ), and sometimes the manuals are kinda meh... the ordering of chapters is no problem for me.

I use the pdf's bookmarks pane on the left in Acrobat for navigation.

And alphabetically? Hmm, would be strange if the manual started with the ADC and not the system basics. 😉

But okay, after these the peripherals could be ordered alphabetically

[Tesla DeLorean]

Whilst I think ST could seriously invest in technical writers, UI experts and QA staff, the only thing in the manuals I expect in alphabetic order is the INDEX.

The ordering of system and peripheral chapters really only needs to be ordered by importance and centrality to the core. They're trying to describe a tree, not create a dictionary or thesaurus...

And for the most part nobody reads this stuff, or in order, most are lost if there's not a video to re-explain things, and others of us just skim the stuff that's irrelevant to our current use case or problem, with an understanding of where to return to if we need to find or confirm something specific.

[PSoco.1]

it is important to distinguish chapters that describe a core concept, chapters that are bound to the system and chapters that describe how peripherals work and how to use them. CPU itself, GPU/coprocessors, security, application notes and datasheet are usually separated documents. I am talking about that document that because it has a chapter for each peripheral it may grow to 5k pages depending on the size of the chip. Usually what you want in the first chapters are the usual document overview (a couple of pages), system overview (the classic diagram of the whole system), summary, memory overview, clock/power/signals overview, GPIO details, security overview and boot information.

Then almost every manufacturer put all peripherals, one by one, describing every single feature and every single register to control them; this is the topic I am talking about, other competitors put in alphabetical order this very large part of the document (usually 95% of the doc). when you have more then 50 chapters some ordering help you find the chapter faster, the ST ordering make sense for small chips when you have 3 I/O peripherals and 5 timers; sorry but in the future we will have larger and larger chips

[PSoco.1]

"And for the most part nobody reads this stuff, or in order"

ordering is to find the chapter faster, if there are many chapters it helps. search tool may be slower when you have a very large document

[PSoco.1]

ah, and let me point out that "ordered by importance and centrality to the core" is subjective. I see very subjective ordering, which is why the question. alphabetical order is very technical... and this document being technical is an appropriate choice. Of course a good document format is to put important info, summeries, explanations, overviews on top, detailed descriptions in the body and data and revision history in the bottom. the body should be ordered in a better way

[S.Ma]

Well, beyond the vertical scrolling or chapter tree PDF, maybe a more 2D or 3D way to navigate the data would be refreshing.