I would love to see MT's documentation in plain old HTML.

PDF might look nice, if the goal is to simulate a printed page. But why do that?

Whether the pdf is opened in separate browser, a browser tab, or in Acrobat directly, it's so much less usable than HTML. No matter how it's triggered, the Acrobat interface is always a workflow intrusion.

I know there is online help at the SA site. I use it. But it's not the same as being able to browse a coherent set of boring old HTML documents.

PDF rhymes with blegch.

You mean like this?

Yes, something more like that. Not sure I would have ever found that link, though. Thanks!

PDf is a usability problem and an all around pain.
Keep it in the office where it belongs.

I wholeheartedly agree with bruce21 and NicoGrrl. Having an officially available online version of the manual would be very useful.

The oddest thing is that there is an official HTML manual - but only the Japanese version. Well, maybe the other supported languages have them, but I've only used the English and Japanese releases.

If I missed an official link to the Six Apart developer's wiki, I apologize; however, the online Japanese manual is linked both directly from within the local Movable Type installation and the Japanese Movable Type website.

What's not official about the copy at Lifewiki?

In general for documentation to be considered official, I would expect that it be linked from the main application support website. The indirect link from the Developer Center to the Developer Wiki to the Movable Type Wiki to the User Manual is a far cry from a link from the support page. (Again, if I just missed a direct link from the support site, I apologize.)

It's a user manual, not a developer API, which I would expect to find through some obtuse chain of links. And it's not that the idea hasn't been considered before. There's an official HTML user manual for version 3.2, but it's out of date and specifically directs the user to the 3.3 manual area, which only references the PDF version.

The way the manual is linked in the Japanese site makes the most sense to me - from the main menu on the main page (link reads マニュアル) - but I can understand linking from the support page as that is where the rest of the documentation is on the English site.

I'm not claiming that the wiki documentation isn't helpful, useful, or correct. I just believe that it would be in the best interest of Movable Type to make such resources more conveniently accessible to their users and customers - either via a manual like the version 3.2 one or a link from the support site to the wiki, thereby endorsing it and making it more accessible.

So what you're actually saying is that it's inconvenient. And you would be correct. That, however, does not comment on its being official. The wiki is underpublicized and underused, but it's at roughly the same level as any other documentation offered.
The reason the HTML version ended up there is largely due to that not having been done by whoever is responsible for the information in the docs section, if such a person actually exists. The template docs have been, and will probably remain, incomplete, especially with work underway on the new version to come out soon.

For what it's worth, my understanding is that it will have complete HTML-format documentation available.

Agreed. I retract my statement about the wiki not being official. I had assumed that since it allowed third-party contributions that there would be some variety of disclaimer on the wiki, similar to the disclaimers on a number of the Sun Microsystems' wikis; however, outside of a select few pages there does not appear to be such.