Yes, you have read right. Blender Manual. This Blender manual as PDF is a side product of the Bforartists development. Bforartists needs a manual too. And the Blender manual is the base for the Bforartists manual. I do think that the Blender manual in PDF is of use for some. And so i publish this for me intermediate step.
Additionally it comes with the whole manual in ODT format too. Which makes the manual editable for everybody. ODT is the format for the popular free office suites LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I have written the odt files with LibreOffice 5.
Note that this Blender manual comes as is. It may still contain some quirks and errors. But i will not change it anymore. The goal was to have a base for the Bforartists manual. Which is reached with this version. When somebody else wants to take the job to maintain and develop it further, feel free to do so.
You can download the Blender Manual as PDF here:
Blender 2.76 PDF Manual, 76.3 Mb
www.reinerstilesets.de/blender/blender_276_manual_pdf.zip
Blender 2.76 Manual in ODT format , 198 Mb
www.reinerstilesets.de/blender/blender_276_manual_odt.zip
It is not exactly split in sub pages like the original Blender online manual. But it is nevertheless split into over 390 single pdf files. The online manual has even more sub pages. I had once planned to have just one pdf per chapter. Which would have meant to have 17 pdf documents. But that didn’t turn out well. Too big and too hard to navigate then. So i ended in having the pdf files nearly split like the original html files.
To convert the Sphinx html files from the Blender manual into odt was surprisingly lots of work. And took around two months. Libre Office usually opens html documents just fine. But it had trouble with the html files for the Blender manual. One of the reasons why nearly all links are gone. The tables for tips, notes etc. did not transfer. Other tables were mixed up too. I had to fix most of them by hand. Most of the over 2500 images came in wrong scaled. There were some formatting issues. And so on. And so it took lots of time. But it is all solved. And the odt documents are easily to edit now. You don’t need a programmer anymore to do changes at the manual. Next step from here is to implement the pdf files into our Bforartists wiki. And change them one by one to fit to our needs. Lots of work ahead with nearly 400 documents …
