For those who may not be aware, Roland's US website has a very good selection of Owners Manuals available for download.

These can be found under the "Support" section of their website and are in "pdf" format.
http://www.rolandus.com/support/product_manual.asp

The G-70 is not yet posted, but the list is otherwise pretty extensive, including arrangers like the EX series, VA Series, G-1000 and several others. I also found they had a manual for my ancient CR-1000 drum machine!

These older manuals have been scanned into pdf files. Only downside is that they have been scanned in such a way that each page is like a photocopy of a paper manual page, rather than actual editable text. This means you cannot search for specific words within the document.

It also makes it rather more difficult to extract small sections to print out for making up personal "quick reference guides" pages for specific features.

Nonetheless, I think that it is worth a big thank you to Roland, both for putting in the effort here, and for making the documents available at all.

[This message has been edited by MikeTV (edited 02-27-2005).]

Do a search online and you can easily find software that will enable you to print the manuals. It really works!

Michael

Great service, and nice to see manuals for
"older" stuff as well, even my dusty RA90.
This is something the rest of the industy
could learn something of.
GJ

Hi Michael

You are correct, of course. There is no problem in printing either an entire manual, or selected pages, from these pdf files.

The potential problem I was trying to describe, was that it was not easily possible to select a small section of text, or an illustration, to reproduce in the way you might do from -say - a "Word" document.

The reason is that the way the manuals have been scanned is rather like a collection of photographs - one for each page of the original paper manual. It is not a collection of separate, editable, typed words and individual pictures or diagrams (the difference is difficult to describe, so I hope that that makes sense!).

When you're on the page that you want in Adobe Reader, press "Print Screen" button on your keyboard.
Then go into some picture editing program, and crop to the part that you want to print and print it.
Not so crisp as Truetype text, but better then nothing

------------------
Have a nice day

Further information on this topic:

Roland have now published manuals for their current and recent arrangers at:
http://www.rolandkeyboardclub.com

These include the G-70, EXR series, VA series etc. The manuals are available in several different languages and, this time, are in fully editable PDF format (as opposed to a "pictorial" type scan of paper originals).

Ten out of ten to Roland for doing this! Let us hope that it is an early sign of a more customer focussed attitude from them.