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Download the Blender Manual

51

Afbeelding 21.jpgThe 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.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

51 Comments

  1. Well quite nice but why was .CHM the choice? Isn't .PDF more comfortable? And knows anybody how it was done(manual/automatic)?

  2. 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.

  3. 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!

  4. 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

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

    Go Wisivenita!!

  6. 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:)

  7. Que buena recopilacion, Muchas gracias, ya necesitaba el manual en casa actualizado y sin necesidad de contectarme a internet

  8. 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.

  9. theblenderboy on

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

    this is totally cool, btw.

  10. 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...

  11. 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!

  12. 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.

  13. theblenderboy on

    mpan3 - could you specify where this checky thingy is? that'd be great. i'm having the same problems as antiguy.

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

    I prefer sites which don't use so many scripts/activex. Don't trust them.

  15. 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 -_-'

  16. 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.

  17. 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. ;)

  18. 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.

  19. 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!

  20. Thank argunda for uploading such a file to two download sites.
    Because of many full-size pictures, manual cannot be small enough.

  21. Kingsley Ndiewo on

    Lovely. Think the guys at Blender.org should make some intro manual to ship with the product. Would help a lot of newbies.

  22. I send my thank you's to the initiator of this new feature.
    I will be going to help someone for the whole night and I will mostly be on idle/standby.
    Because I probably won't have Internet access where I'm going (for the entire night! \o/), this is a godsend! Thank you!

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