Blender Manual D/L : 5 Hours - 350 MB's and counting ...

Support Basics & Interface
1

Wow :

I can’t believe how big this S/W manual is . Thank God for httrack.com . This is one amazing application that is a complete no-brainer to use . Once I finally do eventually D/Load the whole manual , I can even do ‘updates only’ types of Down/Loads .

Some of the animation files could be omitted , I suppose , but I’m sure they are bound to be very entertaining eye candy .

Not complaining of course . When it comes to information , "the more the merrier ! "

However , I totally understand why there isn’t a huge .zip file available for D/L somewhere . That is to say it just wouldn’t make any sense to have such a procedure . A .zip file will be immediately obsolete . Downloading the manual via a program like httrack.com allows a user to D/L any new pages that have been added once the user has the initial user manual download .

Well , this is my newbie take on the situation . Please correct me if I’m wrong .

I’ll bump this thread once I finally do finish the download .

Cheers
Studdio

2

POST THE LINK!!! i’ll mirror it :D:D:D

(Yeah…i did it again :slight_smile: )

3

Are you being sarcastic? I think they could have the manual and textures and stuff included or they could have one download for those who use modem and one bigger for the ones that have broad band.

4

Just a reminder about webcopiers…
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49661&highlight=httrack

5

Talking about a link to the blender book, where is it?

6

In blender go to Help->Manual to go to this link:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Manual

7

Thanx 4 the XXX reply.Bookmarked it and thinking about downloading it.

8

http://blender.org/cms/Documentation.628.0.html

Next to the links to the online version, are links to packed version for download. Are you blind not to see them?

9

are the ones on blender3d.org the same as the wiki one? isnt the wiki more current?

10

You should know that mass-leeching programs like that are responsible for huge loads on the blender.org web servers, and slow down things for everyone, especially making tools like the bug tracker unusable for developers, and have been responsible for the blender website going down in the past.

Please don’t use them.

11

Hi :

Hmm , well , I certainly do aplogise if I caused any trouble during my D/L . However , looks like this is a good time to point out what hundreds of Blender newbies must be going through .

The first thing I did before I even installed Blender , was read the online faq , then the ‘sticky’ on this forum about the online doc’s . That ‘sticky’ seemed to suggest that the way to go is to D/L Httrack and then D/L the online manual .

I know Blender is about as Dynamic as it get’s , so maybe my experience is worth reviewing . V2.4 is out , but the online compressed file is for 2.3 , which is probably good enough , for now , but because Blender is continually changing , literally overnight , as I mentioned , even a compressed 2.4 manual will be almost immediately obsolete .

Sorry for the long post , I know everyone is busy , but maybe I could make a suggestion ? Not sure if this is even possible , but when the 2.40 compressed manual does go up on a server is there anyway the following could be done :

Provide a user with an Httrack or similiar config file that would alllow a user to D/L only the additions or changes to the manual as they go online .

Then again , perhaps there is already a system for keeping very up to date Blender doc’s on your computer , or at least be aware of any changes made in the last week/month etc , by surfing to a particular page listing the changes .

As I say , I’m a complete newbie to this whole Blender mindset so I may be very well overlooking the obvious solutions to keeping abreast of the new additions/changes to the manual .

Thanks for your time and efforts .
Studdio

12

I understand, and having a downloadable manual is definitely a good thing. However I presume due to the wiki being dynamic and executing code on the server every time a page is hit, having lots of successive requests can really hurt it. Maybe there’s some kind of plugin that can export the pages to static HTML, so it could be run once only on the server once a week or month so, and offered as a compressed archive to download.

If I remember, I’ll ask the wiki guys about it, but in the meantime, please refrain from hammering the server with those apps.

13

I understand, and having a downloadable manual is definitely a good thing. However I presume due to the wiki being dynamic and executing code on the server every time a page is hit, having lots of successive requests can really hurt it. Maybe there’s some kind of plugin that can export the pages to static HTML, so it could be run once only on the server once a week or month so, and offered as a compressed archive to download.

If I remember, I’ll ask the wiki guys about it, but in the meantime, please refrain from hammering the server with those apps.

Thanks for the quick reply . Also , I just found these page on the Wiki that lists all the new files uploaded recently .
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Special:Newpages
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Special:Newimages
so we can check this out every once and a while just to see what’s been happening recently ( I think there’s some new stuff from you last week ?) These new pages could probably be added manually by the user if there was a tip on how to do that properly ?

Thanks again for your efforts and sorry about the misunderstanding .
studdio

14

Yes I think an offline format would be a good idea offered every month or so. To save bandwidth, I think just offering a torrent file would be fine. This would save even more bandwidth on the server because people wouldn’t need to even visit the wiki.