Monday, April 5, 2010

2011 Autodesk product manuals

As default when you access Help in AutoCAD 2011 or other 2011 Autodesk products you might be surprised that it opens up in your web browser. See here what it look like if you press F1 for help: http://docs.autodesk.com/ACD/2011/ENU/landing.html

But what if you for some reason don’t want to use the online help from Autodesk website?

In Options>System you have the option to “Use Online Help from Autodesk Website When Available” that specifies whether Help is accessed from the Autodesk website or from locally installed files. It says “when available” but it does not work so that if there is no internet connection it instead uses the local help. You have do decide either or.

Help Browser setting let you specified whether to use Microsoft Internet Explorer or the default Web browser for viewing Help. Not all functionality is supported with other browsers. Not sure what that is though.

If you want to know know the settings there are three system variables available:

WBDEFAULTBROWSER = 0 (read only)
WBHELPONLINE = 1 (read only)
WBHELPTYPE = 1 (read only)     Can anyone shed a light on what this is?

One good thing about this change is that it is easier to always have an up-to-date help. Another one is that it is easy to send a link to someone else instead of trying to describe where to find the location in the previous help file.

Express Tools Help is still not online.

Is it possible to get a printed manual for AutoCAD 2011 or other 2011 products?

No it is not, according to this Knowledge Base document: Printed Manuals or Help for Autodesk 2011 Products

Update: PDF manuals are now available.

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