Download the Blender Manual

Published by Bart on April 20th, 2006 in Documentation

Afbeelding 21.jpg The Blender Manual is available online as a Wiki, in which the editors continually collaborate on improving the content. This is nice if you're a broadband user but if you're not always connected then you used to be out of luck. Not anymore!

Wisivenita has compiled the manual into a Windows Help file that contains all the texts, pages and most of the hyperlinks. It's a bit of a hefty download at 26.5MB but even if you're a modem user you can probably find a place where you can download it and put it on a memory stick for use at home.

If you're not a Windows user: don't worry. You can use these help files on other platforms, too, but you'll need to download a (free) .chm reader. For OS X, there's Chmox. For Linux, you can use Gnome's Chm, KDE's Kchm (both are included in those Desktop environments I think), or Xchm. There are tools available for Pocket PC as well.

I just hope that this initiative won't be a one-off and that this version will be updated regularly and that it gets a prominent place on the Wiki.

Download it, keep it on your desktop and don't worry about not being online anymore when you need the manual.

You can download it from these mirrors:

note: to download from rapidshare, you must scroll down and click free then wait.

Related posts are selected automatically based on their content.

45 Responses to “Download the Blender Manual”

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1 well Apr 20th, 2006 at 7:39 am

Well quite nice but why was .CHM the choice? Isn't .PDF more comfortable? And knows anybody how it was done(manual/automatic)?
2 broken_sword Apr 20th, 2006 at 9:37 am

Awesome!!! Thanks for doing it!

-Broken_Sword-
3 chintan desai Apr 20th, 2006 at 10:20 am

i love to give life to my imagination
4 schnake Apr 20th, 2006 at 11:42 am

Great. For me lacking an offline manual was a big drawback of the "Use a Wiki" approach. Till now ;-)

And using kchmviewer (http://www.kchmviewer.net/) on linux to view this I must admit that CHM seems to be a far better format of choice for this than something like PDF. As kchmviewer (optionally) uses KDE's KHTML-Part (=Konqueror) the pages look and behave *the same* as browsing them directly from the wiki (just with additional searching / navigation features). Really Great.
5 joeri Apr 20th, 2006 at 12:24 pm

Well:
How is pdf more comfortable as a help file? Does it do a better search? Or do you like the fact it always opens in the wrong screen format and puts the text at 106.4% ?

And how it was done you ask? Mainly by a person who has put time and effort into it. Who needs an applaud instead of questions about your personal preferences.

Good job Wisivenita!
6 Dave Apr 20th, 2006 at 1:44 pm

PDF, if properly done, would be pretty cool. But Joeri is absolutely correct. Putting the .chm file together must have taken a lot of time and effort and to share it with us all is damn generous. I am applaudin Wisivenita. Nice one. :D
7 Silverframe Apr 20th, 2006 at 1:56 pm

joeri, calm down. I don't think that well was trying to insult Wisivenita, or putting down the mood or anything?

Go Wisivenita!!
8 Silverframe Apr 20th, 2006 at 2:00 pm

By the way… Well did also say. "Well quite nice"!!

And hey joeri, You are doing a soo good job in the orange studie :)

And again. Go Wisivenita, great thing you have done :D 6+ for you:)
9 celvi Apr 20th, 2006 at 2:01 pm

how too see the teaser, where to download the software
10 Alexander Apr 20th, 2006 at 4:57 pm

Que buena recopilacion, Muchas gracias, ya necesitaba el manual en casa actualizado y sin necesidad de contectarme a internet
11 ivan Apr 20th, 2006 at 5:01 pm

please i want a tutorial for my aun proposs
12 ivan Apr 20th, 2006 at 5:04 pm

is interestig find sits like these
13 ROUBAL Apr 20th, 2006 at 5:23 pm

Very good and usefull job!

Thank you a lot Wisivenita!

I often work on a computer not pluged to the web and having this manual near my hand will be a great help!

Philippe.
14 theblenderboy Apr 20th, 2006 at 5:24 pm

anybody else encountering a really slow download? maybe my dsl is just having a bad day…

this is totally cool, btw.
15 antiguy Apr 20th, 2006 at 5:38 pm

some guys aover at blenderartists have complained that they haven't been able to read the file offline. has anyone had the same experience? this isn't to imply that Wisivenita did a bad job…
16 KidB Apr 20th, 2006 at 6:38 pm

http://blendertestbuilds.de/index.php?dir=Tutorials/Wisivenita/
17 tsel Apr 20th, 2006 at 7:04 pm

antiguy: I'm having similar problems. Need to be online - or give permission for internet access on firewall - to see any contents in this .chm. I also hate the idea of loading actual PAGES rather than just the text content (and possibly reformatting it).

Good idea anyway, so thumbs up!
18 mpan3 Apr 20th, 2006 at 8:29 pm

For people who can't open it offline, if you are using XP with SP2, make sure to check 'always open this file'. Worked for me.
19 Joe Apr 20th, 2006 at 8:36 pm

Oh my god! this is so cool!! thanxs to Wisivenita!
20 theblenderboy Apr 20th, 2006 at 11:55 pm

mpan3 - could you specify where this checky thingy is? that'd be great. i'm having the same problems as antiguy.
21 Zxayant Apr 21st, 2006 at 12:40 am

Those dl sites are a little 'shady' :-(

I prefer sites which don't use so many scripts/activex. Don't trust them.
22 mpan3 Apr 21st, 2006 at 6:32 am

theblenderboy, and to anyone who has problem w/ opening file under XP, look at THIS screenshot:

http://mpan3.homeip.net/file.folder/sss.jpg

oh my, my server is getting hammered, 40GB upload in the past three days.

Zxayant: are you calling my site 'shady'? :-)
23 mpan3 Apr 21st, 2006 at 6:34 am

Opps, wrong link, sorry people:

http://mpan3.homeip.net/file.folder/chmhelp.jpg
24 leodp Apr 21st, 2006 at 8:19 am

Hi all,
I put a tar-bzipped file with the .chm converted in html here:
http://www.physi.uni-heidelberg.de/~dpietra/leo_css4.html#Blender

Ciao, Leo
25 marcdg Apr 21st, 2006 at 11:18 am

graphics are cool
26 hellvy Apr 21st, 2006 at 12:47 pm

I got offline problem too. Every click to each subjet it request outgoing to internet. When i config my firewall denying mshtml help app connect to internet, i have to wait for a long time for text comes up but no images, most of images source are at mediawiki.blender.org -_-'
27 Zxayant Apr 21st, 2006 at 6:33 pm

Mpan3. No, not your site. (sorry) The other two. Your site was only a little slow ;-)
28 dopski Apr 22nd, 2006 at 4:42 am

Thank you very much for being generous Wisivenita. Now my imaginations will live!
29 antiguy Apr 22nd, 2006 at 6:12 am

i found that if you click on the links in each page, you'll get into trouble, but if you use the left pane of the Windows HTML Help viewer (sorry, *nix users) - the one that shows the TOC, you're home and dry. just to make it clear, i hadn't finished downloading it when i posted that comment.
30 Tokeiito Apr 22nd, 2006 at 8:03 pm

good job. i was started to pump all wiki docs.
31 zhalick Apr 23rd, 2006 at 12:17 pm

i want to say thank you for this great job! and i think it would be more nice if it has a release version. anyways thanks again. ;)
32 well Apr 26th, 2006 at 3:57 pm

well my joy about the release might be a little bit misunderstood. It IS a absolutely GREAT WORK!

I was just curious because PDF is used very often for this manual things and I wanted to know if theres now a possibibility to extract a wikibook automaticly. Then a ofline release of the german translation wouldn't be a problem, too.
33 AlexMac Apr 26th, 2006 at 7:19 pm

I recently made a script that converts the wiki into a pdf file, it's still in develoipment but you can see the first results here: http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Meta/PDF_to_Wiki I've put up a copy of the English and Italian manuals since they seem most complete

Probably wont remember to visit here again so post back any comments to the thread on Bf-docboard@projects.blender.org
34 DripStone Apr 28th, 2006 at 2:02 am

Hi, everyone!

I've no idea that the name 'wisivenita'('wisitvenita' is me, actually ;)) will be shown when bart is publishing the manual in CHM format. Thanks for part's help, and also mpan3's, the procedure of uploading becomes easier.

A correct version may be put out after one month. Thank you for all your support and advice. That version might need some coding, but I have no time now.

Also, a PDF format of manual is necessary, especially under linux. But I think a CHM version provides you a more clear vision which will suits your eyes at the same time. Help yourself!
35 DripStone Apr 28th, 2006 at 2:39 pm

Thank argunda for uploading such a file to two download sites.
Because of many full-size pictures, manual cannot be small enough.
36 Henry Brown Jan 9th, 2007 at 5:14 pm

Thanks a bunch.
37 tsekg Feb 24th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

THANKS VM
38 Dripstone Mar 3rd, 2007 at 4:28 pm

You can download a newer version at http://www.blendercn.org/download/blenderwiki/.
Blender Manual(EN) is for English speaker.
39 Danilo May 21st, 2007 at 8:58 pm

Danilo
40 Lance Zalenski Dec 3rd, 2007 at 11:47 pm

fantastic
41 Simon Apr 25th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

would love other stuffs
42 Kingsley Ndiewo Jun 2nd, 2008 at 1:56 pm

Lovely. Think the guys at Blender.org should make some intro manual to ship with the product. Would help a lot of newbies.
43 Hibou57 Jun 8th, 2008 at 10:09 pm

I as just to say that the first manual download link, the one linking to rapideshare, seems to not work.
44 Dripstone Jun 28th, 2008 at 1:38 am

A new address
http://bbs.blendercn.org/upload/BlenderWiki.2007.11.20.chm
45 Marcus Jul 19th, 2008 at 11:35 am

Great