Useless documentation
I will not discuss the lack of local documentation in this topic, but will talk about the online version. Most likely, the problems described below are also present in other Adobe reference guides, but I am primarily interested in Substance Designer.
1. Very cumbersome filling of documentation pages. Instead of focusing only on the reference guide, you put literally the entire Adobe site in it, including headers and footers, unnecessary sidebars, and so on, which only makes it heavier and obstructs the viewing of the documentation. I also looked at the code of the documentation pages and was filled with horror: who could have come up with this, there is so much unnecessary stuff there that you can safely cut each page by 90%, leaving only the documentation text and the necessary images.
2. Your documentation developers probably don’t know what “frames” are, because for some reason they duplicate the same table of contents on each page, although this could have been done in separate files: one file for the left side (table of contents), all other files for the right - the texts of the documentation itself. This will require loading only the text itself without constantly reloading the table of contents.
3. Complete lack of navigation in the reference manual. It's impossible to find a specific topic because the search field is simply missing (yes, it kind of exists, but why would I need to search the entire Adobe site, which, moreover, does not search anything in the documentation?) That is. To find information on any node, I need to double-check all the links in the table of contents and accidentally, after a few hours, I don’t find what I need. There are also no navigation arrows that allow you to navigate through articles.
4. Useless piling up of links on any documentation page: duplicating the same links many times. For what? It just gets in the way of reading. It is better to make good navigation through the documentation.
5. Complete lack of connection between the program and documentation. If I need to find out what this or that node, any parameter or interface element does, it will be impossible to do. In other programs, for example, in Cinema 4D, I can click on any item and select its section in the documentation, both in the local version and online. You simply don’t have this.
It seems that you are abandoning newcomers to their fate, especially those who do not have the Internet or have problems with it. Your team is simply not doing anything in this direction, although it could have done this several years ago.
I'm sorry if my arguments offend you, but this is a problem and worth solving.
