Blender wiki PDF manual: a new start

A few years ago I looked (and finally found) for a way to convert hundreds of “Blender wiki” pages to a single PDF (you can read all the details and history here), using a method which never worked really well, and based on software, HTMLdoc, which today exists no more (source code is still around).

I always tried a way to replace HTMLdoc with something else, but it’s not an easy task: I’m looking for a way to do the conversion live-wiki -> finished pdf with one single command, because in that way I could easily update the PDF from time to time, and make something really useful for many others, i feel.

I am currently experimenting with wkhtmltopdf, and it seems to work somewhat better, although it has drawbacks, but still have to completely test and refine the process, which still involves some PHP preprocessing of the HTML files.

I will report about my work here, but for now you can test this, based on the Blender wiki on october 19, 2012 (I think Blender 2.64 was current at the time), hosted on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/BlenderWikiManualPdf20121019

direct download link: https://archive.org/download/BlenderWikiManualPdf20121019/manual_20121019.pdf (be warned, it’s a 1370+ pages, 29 MB PDF)

wikipdfmanual

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After a few hours, the automatic “derive” task of archive.org, gently provided more formats: now you can also read it Online, EPUB, Kindle, Daisy, Full Text, DjVu, and torrents, too!

wikipdfmanual_online

How wonderful is it? 🙂

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it’s still not perfect, as cover, toc, page numbers are missing but I will do better soon, hopefully.

Let me know what you think!

Marco