Manual Content and User Note Separation

The manual content and the user notes are separated to php_manual_LANG.chm and php_manual_notes.chm. There were several resons to do this, including:

  • This way you can update the user notes and the manual independently as you need.

  • You can have more than one language of the manual, while only need to have one notes file. All the CHM files need to be in the same directory, and all translations need to share the same preferences if you would not like to have more then one notes file.

  • You can bookmark manual pages with notes, or just a notes part of a page separately.

  • You can "turn off" user note display and user note search results by simply deleting php_manual_notes.chm, moving it out of the directory or renaming it.

All these benefits lead us to provide the manual the way you can see it right now. This distribution had the effect on the full text search that you get search results from the manual content and from the user notes as separate ones. The "Location" column shows the source of the result, also enabling you to "add precedence" to manual content results with ordering the results by "Location". User note page titles are also prefixed with "N:" to make them easily distinguishable in the favorites list (there's no location info in the favorites list).