the online owner'* manual are 1 of the many services I receive as a member of the GM Owner Center

www.mygmlink.com/main/US/en/gm/home

To register, you must own a participating vehicle, Bonneville'* '93 & up qualify, I had to fax them my proof of registration to qualify for all the services, which includes:

Maintenance reminders
Recall and safety information
Service history tracking
PDA applications
Your owner'* manual
Vehicle value estimates
Warranty and service information
News and events
Special offers and privileges

If it was the service manual, it _would_ be a 2-Gig file.

I can't say for sure why that is, but I can point out that the '93 version (and possibly others as well) was made with Adobe PDF Library v4.0, which is almost two major revisions old now; we've been distributing v5.0.2Plus and v5.0.4 for some time now, and v6.0 is just coming out.

The v4.0 Library produced PDF language version 1.3, which is a bit behind the current standard and might explain the discrepancies in thumbnail handling that you're seeing.

Right, the Index is pretty weak, and seems to be hampered by "dumbing down" requirements which force them to list topics by wording them as how people might look for them rather than by what they're actually called, yet simultaneously coming up with unfathomable entries that no one would conceivably be looking for (e.g. "Snowstorm, If You're Caught in a" )

At minimum, the Table of Contents and Index of a PDF document should have hyperlinks allowing the reader to click on the entries and/or page numbers in order to jump directly to the referenced item, but unfortunately that isn't the case here.

It could be worse, though; my father'* '83 BMW 528e features an even stranger Owner'* Manual, with rambling sections like "Ten Commandments of Safe Driving," in which Commandment 4 is simply missing altogether.

Well, yeah. I would first be interested in hearing whether the original source files are available somewhere, but I suppose it would have to go through 50 layers of attorneys. What we've got right now is kind of shaky, and a number of the pages are crooked scans with all sorts of tramlining effects running through the text. Not pretty.

I could, with enough time, motivation and beer, although I suspect the results would probably have to remain an "unofficial" version of the PDF document circulated privately, since to do anything more public than that might invite copyright hassles. I've already downloaded the '93 file to add to my PDF sample collection anyway for testing with our software, so if I get a chance to try making improvements, I'll do so.

Since this is starting to get boring and off-topic, I'll just refer anyone who'* interested in the Adobe PDF Library and how it produces these PDF manuals to visit our website (we're the sole distributors of the Adobe PDF Library, other than via Adobe themselves) at http://www.datalogics.com/pdflibrary.asp

If you're interested in adding it to your programming application, you can request an evaluation copy of it, and I'll end up being your Tech Support rep for it. Lucky you.