Download the Blender Manual Wiki in PDF

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If you’re not always online, it can be kind of awkward having to rely on the Blender Wiki documentation (I guess ;-). Next time you’re out hiking, painting the roof or are just without a broadband connection, make sure you have your copy of Marco Ardito’s Blender Wiki PDF with you!

Marco writes:

Hi, if anyone interested i did it in pdf format. I plan to update it monthly. jesterking offered to host the (quite large) file here. Up to now, it is a single pdf file, over 1700 pages, about 52 MB.

That’s a pretty cool project Macro, I hope you’ll keep it up for a long time!

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    • Kirado

      wow.. that’s a great idea.. very cool!

    • JP

      Wow that’s very usefull. yes update it monthly please, Thank You so much!!

    • Alex Blank

      YES! Very useful for those of us whose primary blender rig is not connected to the Internet.

    • RedJay

      Wow, yes that’s very useful. Keep up the good work!!

    • dyf

      this is very useful for when blender.org goes down..
      i can be less dependent on the online version now..

    • Occulus

      The last time I looked at the Blender Wiki, it was horribly out of date. Really, someone needs to put together a project to update the Wiki to the latest version of Blender. I can’t tell all of you how many issues I had learning Blender by trying to rely upon the Wiki. At the least, the Blender Wiki needs a disclaimer stating that “these tutorials are written for Blender X.XX and do not reference interface changes beyond Blender X.XX.”

      And, honestly…. the Blender Foundation needs to stop moving things around in the interface if they expect the Wiki to be at all useful. This issue almost drove me away from Blender entirely… until I found the Tufts University tutorials. *Those* are current; the Wiki (the last time I checked) is not.

    • fraek

      still pretty good `~…

    • http://home.deds.nl/~mp/ ysvry

      the german wiki is better up to date , blame it on german grundlichkeit.:P

    • ChristianK

      @Occulus: Tufts U tuts? Can you give a link?

    • Tom

      THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

      I’ve wished for this for some time now and just haven’t had the time to do it.

    • Timmy

      Why not to ZIP it well! To reduce download size. Think it would be better for all! Does anybody agree with me? Please Do it for all world!

    • http://www.1door2.eu patdog

      @ ChristianK, http://www.gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html wait for page to fully load….

    • JiBZ

      Cool idea!!! Thanx!

    • http://3d-synthesis.com ROUBAL

      Great job. Thank you very much !
      My best computer, on which I use Blender most of the time is not connected to Internet.

      This PDF manual will be very usefull !

    • zapman

      yep, very useful! thank you!

    • Marco

      Hello everybody! :)
      as i said, i needed that! so i made it :))
      then i thought: maybe someone else needs this too.
      see: http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13461

      btw, i made another try with pytondocs: (see:
      http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/09/blender-python-api-as-pdf/)

      i found quite easy to use htmldoc (i need just one click to rebuild it directly from the online wiki.. quite easy, uh?) (see http://www.htmldoc.org)

      unfortunately that program is actually not utf-8 compatible and so localized versions (that could be just as easy) render out really awkward pdfs… i’m working on it , tough :) i’m exploring two ways:
      - a transcoding proxy utf-8 -> iso-8859-1 . maybe some privoxy expert around?
      - process pages with php. in this way i could easily strip “unneeded” parts as headers and footers, navigation menus. lets see what happens.

      maybe wiki site mantainers could create a specific layout to help the whole process, who knows? :)
      i think they could do easily this better than me but in the meanwhile i needed that pdf.

      @Timmy: it’s big because its BIG! i just tried to 7z/ultra it and its 46 MB instead of 52…
      i could upload separate chapters (see http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13461)
      nut i’m using jesterking’s space and publishing efforts so… well once a month 50MB is not too much.
      try to use some downloader to get it in multiple steps.

      if you need other (not localized) sections just ask. I’m working on Scripts dcumentation as single PDF. It should be useful, although often quite old documentation.

      Have fun!

      Marco

    • Levantern

      Thank you very much. It’s a very nice service.

    • Marco

      Urgh! i just noticed that the news title is “Download the Blender Wiki in PDF”

      well that’s misleading: the pdf is ONLY about the “Manual” section of the wiki, not ALL of the wiki! :D

      Marco

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @Marco: fixed!

    • TX_RX

      Maybe get this seeded on a torrent site somewhere?

    • Joeri

      Cool, now I can put it on my iPod Touch and read it at normal speed…

      Occulus wrote:
      “and do not reference interface changes beyond Blender X.XX.”

      You dont know at 2.45 it will not work with 2.46.
      Wiki is just to stupid to help maintain this.

      Occulus wrote:
      “And, honestly…. the Blender Foundation needs to stop moving things around in the interface”

      I total agree. Same goes for book writers. In one year a book can be obsolete.
      There you have a disadvantage of opensource; no marketing director syncing needs of users towards the product.
      But… a good resource is the release log: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/
      Big read, but brings you up-to-date and experienced users learn something new.

    • http://inkweaver-review.blogspot.com NathanKP

      This is awesome! I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time!

      NathanKP – Inkweaver Review

    • Nemesis

      An updated manual is very welcome.

      Thank you.

    • tyrant monkey

      @Occulus

      I don’t about the tutorial section but the manual always states on the header for what version the article was written for.

      the manual side of the wiki is pretty useful some of the stuff can be outdated but still revelant and it beats a lot of other wiki’s I’ve visted that are pretty empty.

    • Handoko

      That’s great. I’m new user in Blender, I don’t have online internet at my home.

      Thanks.

    • http://pw-software.com NetOperator Wibby

      Even though the wiki isn’t always up to date [as some have already said], I am glad that somewhere made a PDF! And, since it is planned to have the PDF updated monthly, the wiki will be on track with the current version of Blender eventually. Thanks to everyone who made this happen.

    • http://ttnn.deviantart.com/ Tom Telos

      Brilliant ! BLESS YOU !!

      Documentation dispersion is the single biggest barrier to greater acceptance of Blender: thank you for rounding it all up !!

    • Robert Zimmermann

      Hi.

      Super documentation. Thanks a lot!

      Cheers.. Robert.

    • http://www.jenkinscustomknives.com David

      Thank you!

    • Sophi

      Thanks! :D

    • Marco

      Hi all!
      just to let you know that (as promised! :)) i have updated (&improved!)
      the Blended PDF Wiki Manual. And Nathan is still hosting it and
      publishing the links at:
      http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/category/blender/

      Plus, there are more docs available now:
      * Wiki Manual PDF (51MB), updated 2008.10.01
      o This is the PDF version of the Manual from the http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual
      * Script Catalog PDF (6MB), updated 2008.10.02
      o This is the PDF version of the Script Catalog from http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Scripts/Catalog
      * Reference PDF (6MB), updated 2008.10.02
      o This is the PDF version of the Blender Reference from http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Reference
      * Release Logs PDF (4MB), updated 2008.10.02
      o The release logs until 2.47 from http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs

      Ciao!
      Marco

    • John Kuna

      The link to
      http://www.letworyinteractive.com/load_wiki_pdf.html
      is dead.
      All I am getting is a 404 error.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      Link updated.

    • cool.aquarian

      Hi,

      When I am downloading the Manual, it is showing as 24.4 MB only instead of the stated 51MB.
      After completion of download of 24.4 MB, when I try to open the pdf,
      Acrobat Reader gives the error “The file is damaged and could not be repaired”

      Please Help…

    • kilon

      Aquarian , I had the same problem , download it from a diffirent machine and works now. Yeah the size is 24.4 not 51, no worries there.

      Thanks Marco, I wanted a pdf like crazy as I no longer have internet at home, only at work.

    • dibu

      Yeah I am having the same problem…Its getting dwnloaded but when I try to open it gives error that the file is damaged

    • shadowzero7891

      Wow, thanks for the info! :) very helpful

    • Ar_wind

      Hi there seems to be a problem when i try to download the new manual, it downloads up till around 496 KB and then cuts !! The file gets corrupted !! I tried several times I am using a dial up connection. I was able to download the older manual another time fully but i think it was hosted elsewhere !! Can anyone help !! Is there another server from which i could try to download it ?

    • Gaurenteed download

      After the 8th or 9th attempt to download this from http://www.letworyinteractive.com I gave up and looked for an alternate source, which Marco has provided.

      So just do a search for… Blender PDF wiki manual unofficial 20090902 or… BlenderPdfWikiManualUnofficial_20100622

      here… http://www.archive.org

      Obviously the 20100622 is the most up to date version.

      After you click on the link you searched for, right click in the left hand panel on the PDF link and save.

    • Invisible

      I was getting ready to thank you… then it turns out that this file is damaged and unreadable. Thanks anyway.

    • m.ardito

      Hi, i last version is here (and it’s downloadable, atm) along with previous also:

      http://pdf.letworyinteractive.com

      it’s almost 25 MB though, you could use a download manager to help…

      Marco

      PS: as soon as 2.5 docs spice up, i’ll do the same for the newer blender version…

    • http://na siege

      I would really like to download this PDF and start learning Blender but no luck so far. Is it just me or is the PDF entirely un-downloadable? Every time I try it cuts cuts out on me at about 10%. I tried looking around to see if it was maybe hosted elsewhere… NOT. letworryinteractive.com seems to be the only place! This dude hosting your Wiki needs to get his act together, either that or get it hosted somewhere else.

    • m.ardito

      @siege

      hi,m i don’t understand why some people has this behaviour downloading the pdf (probably connection drops during the download, a download manager with resume capability would help)
      anyway, you can try here, too:

      http://www.archive.org/details/BlenderWikiManualPdf20100622

      i’ve just uploaded it.

      and here
      http://www.archive.org/details/BlenderWikiGamekit2

      you find the same (a pdf version) for the new gamekit2 wiki pages
      HTH
      Have fun, Marco

    • Nara Ken

      awesome! thanks for the book.

    • M Singh, india

      thank you very much