Yes, there are times when I would also prefer a searchable PDF. MM probably figures an online version would be easier to keep current, which has been a complaint in the past.

Doesn't the option below let you search the online help? (I followed the User Manual Link and then chose "Looking for...")

With the online help, you need to know what your'e searching for in the way it wants you to search. It tries to second guess what you want and it's not very good at that.

With a .pdf, you can search on a single keyword if need be and rapidly go through all the pages stopping on the one that can resolve the issue (or confirm a bug).

With one issue, I think I've found a bug in Preferences but the online help is useless except to tell me that changes have been made. Yea, I know that. If it showed every instance in a way that I could just go through them, I'd be content but that's not how it works.

So I have to go through a support ticket or phone call or both. My first in the 25 years or so that I've been using Finale.

Mike (et al.) - I just stumbled across this post as I was searching (go figure) for an unrelated topic. While I definitely realize that the lack of a searchable PDF is a handicap, I thought this suggestion might help alleviate some of your pain:

You could try using the "site:" syntax in a Google (or similar search engine) search to only search our User Manual website for specific key words. Here is an example:

Searching for "Suffix" (using Finale 25 on a Mac), you would type into the Google searchbar: "site:usermanuals.finalemusic.com/FinaleMac suffix". This will search all of our User Manual (Finale 25 on Mac) pages for the keyword "Suffix".

AS you can probably tell, you can search within a specific Finale version and OS and/or increase the level of complexity within the search terms to find more specific results. Might this be helpful?

Cheers!

I'd like to add my support for a .pdf of the manual. If you want to have an online manual, great. Creating a .pdf option for those of us on the go, where there isn't always wifi available, is a small ask, and seems like a no-brainer. I have a laptop with me on the road, and I have to keep it lean to accommodate DAWs, plugins, etc. Keeping the massive .htm download on my laptop just so I can access it while working on flights, etc., isn't realistic. Even after deleting the tutorial videos, it's still larger than a comparable, single .pdf file. Thanks!

S

One of the biggest problems is that you need to know Finalespeak. If you don't know what it's called, how can you search for it?