Noob noob'

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi-
I’m a new newbie so of course the wiki ‘Noob’ book caught my eye. But, not having a home isp, need to download it. But there’s no download button on its page. Am i missing something?

Skeleton walks into a bar, orders a beer and a mop

2

You can go to the Toolbox on the right and select “Printable Version” and either print the tuts you select or save them to Word or Powerpoint or somesuch. I don’t beleive there’s a zip file anywhere except in the tutorials thread at the top of this page.

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3

I very much appreciate your helpfulness but i already tried that and it got me nowhere. I clicked on Printable Version but got no such menu options.

Tec people are great at doing incredibly complex things, but tend to bump into walls when it comes to the simple stuff. And Blenderoids are no excception…

I also tried to download the manual, parts one and two and got nowhere. If i get desperate enough i can individual hotlink-and-save entry after entry. But with Blender’s difficulty rep it doesn’t seem wise of the System Lords to make downloading entry-level help so convoluted…

If they’re trying to make Blender more difficult than it has to be they’re doing a fine job. If they aren’t, i have a word for theM: KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. One button: download.

I lust after the upcoming fluid dynamics version but if i can’t even download the *ing beginners help files I guess i won’t be going swimming anytime soon.

Anyway, thanks anyway!

4

I seriously doubt that anyone would go to the trouble of making anything difficult to download. It’s probably more like they’re geeks and know how to do it without having dedicated links and us gearheads are still trying to catch up.

Anyhow, here are zip files of the manual in Html and Pdf:

http://download.blender.org/documentation/

You probably hav this but for fluids see here:

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Fluids_simulation.675.0.html

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5

The main documentation manual can be downloaded in one-file form as Fligh pointed out.

As for the wikibook - Wikis by their nature are very hard to save to a local copy. There are ways, but they are tricky because you have to be careful - if you just get a naive spider program to download the site it’ll find the “history” link and download all the previous versions of the page! Plus the wiki source for every previous version of the page, the diff for every version, and so on and so forth… You end up with many many files wasting space for each page, and a very unhappy server admin. Wiki interfaces, particularly MediaWiki, are usually optimised for ease-of-use while being delivered from the server, and there are links everywhere.

Plus there’s the fact that any saved version will be out of date very quickly - sometimes within the time it takes to save it (for popular wikis), though this isn’t usually a big problem.

I don’t know offhand any software that’ll help here, but suffice it to say that it’s not as simple as adding a “download” link, and TPTB didn’t just leave it off to be evil.

6

Hi-
Thanx muchly for the link to the manuals!
A correction/apology- i certainly didn’t mean to imply any evil intent [just clumsiness]!!
I’m still dismayed about the docs situation. Any system that requires a newcomer to pester other members for help accessing basic program info needs fixing. If somebody gives you a free car without a steering wheel you may be grateful for the gesture but still not expect to get anywhere in it.
I’m surprised and puzzled that, with Blender’s apparently large user base, that [at least third-party] books aren’t available. Perhaps it attracts only stingy users! :wink: Anyway, thanks.