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Blender Help says I can download the Blender 2.78 Manual for offline use - how - where?

Mike Thomas
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  • blender (which I use, love and support since two decades...) has a terrible history of downloadable manuals... worst blender aspect ever, imho. when it was on mediawiki I started a project to regularly create a pdf version from it... then they switched to a version based on "reStructuredText " and although every project I've seen using this kind of system (see https://readthedocs.org/) has html, pdf, epub export at least... blender never had one. You could try to download manual sources and build it locally: see https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/about/contribute/index.html – m.ardito Feb 09 '17 at 22:40

2 Answers2

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There is a link for the online documents here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev . I'm not sure why it doesn't work, but there is a link to download a zip file, but the actually link tag isn't working in the wiki. For now, you can download directly, I guess: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/blender_manual.zip

alyawn
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The make.bat file in the blender documentation subversion repository includes a "make epub" option that will use their tooling to build a local epub file locally. It's reasonably easy to do this same thing on Mac or Linux box if that's your platform.

A step-by-step of what I did was:

  • svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-manual/trunk/blender_docs
  • cd blender_docs
  • virtualenv .venv_blender
  • source .venv_blender/bin/activate
  • pip install -r requirements.txt

and I added this to the local Makefile:

epub: .FORCE .SPHINXBUILD_EXISTS
    # './' (input), './epub/' (output)
    QUICKY_CHAPTERS=$(QUICKY_CHAPTERS) \
    $(SPHINXBUILD) -b epub $(SPHINXOPTS) ./manual "$(BUILDDIR)/epub"

Then make epub generates an epub file into build/epub directory.

heckj
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