Hopefully someone can help me. I'm about to change the distributor cap and rotor on my vehicle.

I have two sets of instructions - Honda and Haynes. The Honda manual gives directions for the full distributor replacement which says that the rotor has to face position one (where wire 1 would go). The Haynes manual doesn't. I'm making an assumption here that the rotor should only point to position one ONLY if you're replacing the the distributor and resetting the timing. Does anyone know if this is correct? TIA