About Blender Wiki PDF Manual

ON this site you can download an unofficial PDF version of the Blender Wiki Manual pages.

I produced this PDF copy for my personal use since I needed it to learn using Blender, and I could not find an up to date alternative to my knowledge. I've read that Blender documentation is released under the Open Content License (http://opencontent.org/opl.shtml). This license is reported at the end of this pages, below. I am trying to stick to this licence, but i'm no license expert: if you feel something is wrong, just let me know why and possibly how to fix.

Modifications to the wiki content

I did not modify the content of the wiki pages except for removing the parts typical of a web page, which are not needed in a "book", since you don't have to browse through web links, but scroll pages.

Previous versions

In the past i built the wiki manual pdf using different tools to:

• collect links (http://gemal.dk/mozilla/linky.html)
• download pages and editing them (http://www.php.net)
• build the pdf with images (http://www.htmldoc.org)
• build the pdf bookmarks (http://flavianopetrocchi.blogspot.com)

trying to automate everything as possibile... I never liked at all that workflow, but it worked in some way.

For this release i managed to use only two tools:

• http://www.php.net

  Used it to scan the base page, find links, download locally pages and images, and build the .book for the next tool

• http://www.htmldoc.org

  Open the .book file and click "generate". After a minute or so, the PDF is ready.

• http://flavianopetrocchi.blogspot.com/

  Open the produced PDF file and adjust bookmarks text, level, mostly anything, save a new PDF

Still, there are some (minor) problems:

• many internal links are broken: some of them work and some do not. I don't know why. When they work, often they jump to the "previous" page they refer to. Try to advance of one page, in case;

• there are strange symbols here and there: the HTMLdoc version I have (1.8.27) is not UTF-8 compatible, it renders web pages using ISO-8859-x encodings. I use ISO-8859-1 since i think it's the best for english Language. New versions or other tools may improve this aspect, in the future. Is not something that makes text difficult to understand, though.

• Size is huge (about 25 MB): there are many pages, and many big images and they're useful. I could reduce quality setting for JPGs below 85%, if needed but quality will suffer. Compressing the PDF does not change much the size (tried 7z ultra)

You should be able to know what's changed since the last release browsing here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Special:Recentchangeslinked/Manual

Where to find this PDF

Up to now, you should be able to find it here (http://pdf.letworyinteractive.com/download). If any change should happen, i'll post on major forums/blogs for everyone to know.

Since in the past months Nathan had some troubles with his site, I always also upload a copy on archive.org, so check there.

Alternatives to this PDF

To my knowledge. See:

1. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Meta/Wiki_to_PDF

2. http://www.blender.it/manuali.html (bottom of the page)

3. http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?products_id=79

4. http://www.blendernation.com/2006/04/20/download-the-blender-manual/

5. Download the entire html structure on your PC with tools like wget or winhttrack

Obviously, there are other books or tutorials or videos/dvd about Blender you can download or buy. They're all useful stuff. Here I am referring only to offline versions of the official Blender manual.

How to contact me

I do this in the spare time so i can't spend too much time on it but if you want to suggest me improvements or other ways to do this, or alternatives, please feel free to do so. Here's how: "m.ardito" is the username and the domain is "libero.it". you know how to use them ;). Please don't post the "reconstructed" address, in no web page, blog, mailing list or newsgroup, anywhere. I already have enough spam to deal with! Thanks.

Have fun! Marco Ardito