Yes, I really have to agree regarding the images used in the manual. Last I checked, the manual contained lots of outdated images/screen shots.
However, many of them were probably not updated because that does indeed mean lots of manual work currently.
And it would be pointless to update things now for different aircraft/GUI dialogs...
However, we should really be looking for an automated solution to specify screen shots procedurally and use fgfs to create them using meta information.
So that the images in the manual can be also updated by running fgfs and creating the latest screen shots with meta data in the form of "c172p-set.xml @ KSFO 28R".
Manually updating all images is LOTS of work. And just think about all the GUI dialogs that were changed recently ... and that WILL BE changed again once we have a fully canvas based GUI system.
Stuart's tutorial system demonstrates that we already have a scriptable simulator that can zoom in/out of the cockpit panel procedurally, and focus certain instruments - and we already do have bindings for creating screen shots. So in combination, these features could be used to create up to date screenshots of aircraft, dialogs etc.
Thus, it would seem absolutely possible to add a "scripted-screenshot-mode" to FG to create screen shots automatically for different aircraft/airport/situations/configurations and write them to a folder, where they can be picked up by the LaTex tool chain to be embedded into the final PDF file.
Now that would really be a time-saver that could actually improve the documentation significantly ... and it would be far superior to manual efforts, even wiki-based ones