so are we going to have a PDF version or not yet?
thanks
happy bl
I had a personal project, when manual was on wiki, to generate a pdf from it (first tries where since 2008, I think)
I started that conversion because I preferred the pdf to print it. Then shared it, and during the time i had many (?) thanks from people all around the world, which need a pdf version for many reasons. Similar comments you can find in older posts about PDF manual versions…
#1 it’s downloadable…
I remember people (many of them in the US, which I couldn’t suspect…) that needed this to avoid expensive internet charges in their area… their only alternative was the online wiki.
#2 it’s a perfectly printable format, & it can have page numbers: think to a classroom lesson about blender: all student have the pdf and can go to page 123…
#3 it’s one of the most common documentation formats, many people have tools suited, which allow them to hilight, add notes, comments, bookmarks and also tools to process them, to extract pages/sections, transform, etc… in a way they are used to. someone prefers a single file also to share it, search text inside…
#4 someone was happy to have a pdf in their language (spanish, chzech, french, italian, etc): although the wiki was always up to date only in english, for someone having maybe justthe basics section in their language was confortable to start, and understand it.
Marco
Also ounce you have it as PDF you don’t need the internet !
happy bl
I checked on converting the HTML to PDF.
This uses the “singlehtml” generator, then wkhtmltopdf to convert to the PDF.
Its quite large so this is just the getting started chapter
(5mb)
The full PDF,
http://download.blender.org/ftp/ideasman42/blender_manual_html.pdf (70mb)
The main issue is it misses cross-references, that can be supported
but involves compiling a patched QT version:
Am not against this, but it remains a bit of a hassle.
Nevertheless, if only one person needs to setup the patched QT,
we can at least use it without the overhead of having to output to
latex (and resolve issues noted in previous mail).
See bf-docboard thread http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-docboard/2015-July/004884.html
I prefer PDF format myself because html doc has the bad habit of braking documentation to multiple pages you have to press a link to navigate through making it much more of a hassle. Also HTML may have a problem resizing on different windows, or other problems being viewed on mobile platforms. Through my experience PDF remains the most convenient and reliable format for reading documentation the proper way as a book.
On mobile platforms , like my smartphone and my tablet, there also some very cool and convenient PDF readers that make reading PDFs ever more pleasurable. They have nice features like text to speech, auto scrolling, turn page to dark theme and many more. To my knowledge there is nothing similar for HTML documentation.
FBReader.
Dunno how good it is on iOS(if there at all), but the android versions can read htmls just fine(plus text-to-speech, dark theme, etc)
For me its actually the opposite. Reading pdf’s at the desktop is often more painful than html. As far as i know pdf is meant for print anyway.
Multiple pages load and respond way faster than a giant single page.
On MacOS pdfs are super smooth viewing them and I have zero issues with mobile platforms, android and ios. I dont rememeber having an issue on windoom either. As a matter of fact browsers are super slow compared to pdf viewers from my experience , another reason to prefer pdf format. I had to drop firefox and chrome because they were overheating / maxing the cpu of my macbook air and replace it with Opera which is somewhat faster and lighter on resources.
I dont have an issue with reading hmtl documentation as long as its single page and offers a smooth experience like my pdf readers. Of course for reference documentation like the Blender Python API , I am ok with the multi page hmtl format with the links and the index.
FBReader.
Dunno how good it is on iOS(if there at all), but the android versions can read htmls just fine(plus text-to-speech, dark theme, etc)
thanks will keep in mind and give it a try.
Everyone has own preferences of course,
but did anyone who prefers PDF’s check them to see if they’re worth using?
Generated from sphinx/latex -> pdflatex
Remaining issues noted here:
https://developer.blender.org/T45512
Generated from sphinx/singlehtml -> wkhtmltopdf
Remaining issues noted here:
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-docboard/2015-July/004887.html
Thank you very much ideasman42, the pdf manual coupled with Blender’s Pie Menu’s
have made Blender much easier to get along with imho. 
How would these look like in a landscape page orientation? I like having the manual on a second screen, but you can’t “flip through full pages” and have them at a readable zoom at the same time. Zoom in to read something, and you have to switch to inpage scrolling.
To me, the first one appears to have the better output with a basic TOC at the start to let me find things. Unfortunately I find the TOC a bit too basic. The web version at least have sub TOC for sections, which is very helpful, so I’ll stick with that for now (for second screen use). Haven’t tried them out on mobile device just yet, but I guess Blender manual is perfect “toilet literature” 
thank you ideasman , it looks ok to me. There are some pages that contain only 2 images and some images are just too big but overall its very readable. Looks like i found what I will read for my summer vacations 
Looks its up to data, I assume its automatically built.
May I advise to put the link to the pdf in a visible place in blender.org ? Like maybe Download section ? I think it will make it much easier for beginners and the rest of us mere users to find the pdf easily without having to google with unreliable results.
Afterall having pdfs visibly available is a standard practice.
@CarlG, generating landscape pdf’s isnt really a problem. but didnt test.
@kilon, which PDF were you giving feedback on?
Can you give some more details? Whats the benefit here? How would you suggest to use it exactly?
Update, https://www.blender.org/manual/contents.html now has link to downloadable site (zipped HTML files).
Link at top of the page.
Cool beans! I’d suggest embedding the date in the filename, so next time I check, I’ll know if I have the latest.
Thanks for doing this.