Note: this zip is also linked at the bottom of the main AS3LCR page http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/index.html

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ActionScript/3.0_ProgrammingAS3/flash_as3_programming.pdf

Thanks for all your comments. You’re obviously passionate about having usable documentation, and that’s great.

I definitely don’t take personal offense at your comments. On the contrary, I greatly appreciate them and I will be passing them along.

I’m not familiar with XASH although I’m very interested to find out more about it, and whether we can do anything to make the documentation work better with it. If you have a chance and can point me to some info about it, that’d be great.

Re: “the online version takes you to the community forums” — Late in the process an additional feature was added to the search to allow you to limit it to “this help system only” (which seems to limit it to one “book” although I thought it limited it to a single product.) For most CS4 documentation that checkbox is unchecked by default, but for the Flash CS4 ActionScript documentation we specifically made a point of having it checked by default (e.g. see the Programming ActionScript 3.0 page). This option doesn’t show up next to the language reference search box, but a quick test seems to show that it is turned on for those searches as well.

Also, as Google indexes the pages more, and as external links change the way Google ranks the results, we’re trying to tune the custom index to make sure results show up as expected. If there are certain terms you’re searching for that aren’t turning up, or that give unexpected results, please let us know via a comment in the help (or a comment here) and we’ll look into it.

I’m glad you were able to find the files on your computer eventually. On my machine (Windows XP) the help files are here:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Help\en_US\AS3LCR\Flash_10.0\

Not sure where this folder would be on a windows machine. The problem with the current help system though in CS4 is that it is almost impossible to find these help files unless you are using the internal code editor, and right click on a property and click “view help”.

Please petition for a downloadable version of this url:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/index.html

XASH is much preferred, as it allows itunes like instant searching, and your online version of the help currently sends the search to the community forums which rarely returns good results when I’m just trying to find the docs for a certain class.

I don’t want to offend you personally, but the CS4 help system is currently abysmal. In typical Adobe fashion, it is a good idea not fully implemented.

As far as I know there isn’t a download for the language reference. I’ll check and see if I can find out whether there are plans to add one at some point — but admittedly I doubt it.

Once Flash CS4 actually ships, the language reference will be included when you install Flash on your machine. For CS4, all the “in product” help actually runs separately in your web browser (i.e. when you press F1 or choose Help from the menu, it opens a page in your web browser), so you could access the HTML pages directly, too.

The CS4 help works like this: first, it checks if you have an internet connection. If you do it automatically connects you to the online version. This is good because we make corrections to the online version as we find mistakes — something we can’t do as easily for the version on your hard drive. However, if you don’t have a net connection, it loads up the help off your hard drive (but still as HTML pages in your web browser). Due to the significant amount of lead time necessary for content that is actually included in the installer, the stuff that’s available when you’re offline is smaller than the online help. For the ActionScript content, the language reference is available offline but the Programming ActionScript 3.0 guide is only available online.

If I had to guess, I’d say that’s one reason why there is a PDF download for Programming ActionScript 3.0 but not a downloadable version of the language reference.