I bought the books for the Adobe CS Standard, that cost $67.38 after all is said and done. Tack on another $10 if you get the Premium set, which adds the manual for GoLive CS and the Getting Started Guide for Acrobat 6.

Talking about Acrobat, it has not had a printed manual, I don't think ever. I have bought Acrobat since 3.0 and it has never came with anything substantial in the printed form. And for that matter there is no manual installed in PDF form with Acrobat 6 Professional. Why not?

I don't understand why Adobe does not use the Mac OS X Help architecture for its online help. Macromedia does. Many other developers do. Its nice to have everything in the Help Viewer app. Acrobat 6 help is in its own interface inside the app. Photoshop CS opens in a web page, same with Illustrator CS, and InDesign CS. I am willing to bet its the same thing for the GoLive CS help. I know from doing it myself that it takes little time to get your online help into the Help Viewer application when you already have it in HTML. This is because Help Viewer in a sense is a web browser. I do not understand why Adobe does not go the extra mile to put their online help into the Help Viewer. And then there is Acrobat, the odd ball. It has its own Help within the app.

I wonder if the Adobe CS help is in the standard Windows Help UI.

I have a lot of "why didn't they go the extra mile" questions for the Adobe CS suite of apps. More on that in a minute.

Lets put things into perspective, and not just point the finger at Adobe. I also bought the Macromedia Studio MX 2004 suite for $1000, and all I got by means of printed documentation was the same type of 90 some pages of "what's new" and "how to" projects. Macromedia also sells the manuals in print on their site. Of course I am the type of person that buys the Macromedia API reference manuals as well, as I like writing extensions for Dreamweaver.