Setting up offline Blender manual(s)

Documentation
1

It would be useful to me if there was a formal way to access local copies of the Blender manual. Currently I use a script I made to deploy the manual (and API docs) to many workstations and then to point the menus to the locally saved manual it does some string replacement in these files

  • bl_ui/space_topbar.py
  • modules/rna_manual_reference.py
  • bl_operators/wm.py

It works well, with the Help menu bringing up the manual as well as the context based manual options.
Occasionally something in this script needs tweaking due to changes in Blender, which reminds me that something official would be nice. Upon the release of Blender 3.0 this is one of those times. Since there is a downloadable manual, setting up a way to use this within Blender would be a good way to handle this. Unless there is a way I am not aware of, in which case I will be embarrassed, but grateful to be made aware of it.

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I am quite a newbie to Blender (and this forum), but have you tried building your local copy from the source? I did that just as a test a couple of days ago and the instructions were very straightforward and just worked. And you can adjust the relevant URLs, etc before the build. And even change the target output format.

Disclaimer: I am an IT person.