Create Local Manual

Manual - Building
These instructions are for Windows, but the basics are the same for any platform. We use a script to pull the manual from the wiki and turn it into static html.

Remove the old manual and make sure you can rebuild a new one:
 * 1) Make sure you have Python installed and on your PATH. Use version 2.7.*, not 3.2.*.
 * 2) Delete  if it exists.
 * 3) On VS, the manual can be built in audacity\help\manual by building the 'help' project.
 * 4) On Windows if you just want to get the manual, go to, run wiki2htm and wait for it to complete.
 * 5) There is also a wiki2htm.sh, which may still work (untested here, feel free to update this comment)

Manual - Testing
(Note: This is no longer required for 'official' releases since it will be done as part of the preparatory phase.)

Test the unzipped manual using http://linkchecker.sourceforge.net/ or similar, and report errors/warnings as appropriate.

Manual - Zipping and Uploading
For a Release, somebody should follow these instructions just after the 'manual freeze' so that builders have the same manual for all OSs. That person will be agreed as part of the Release Process.


 * 1) Zip the result of the above as audacity-manual-.zip (for example audacity-manual-2.0.1rc1.zip). When unzipped, it should produce a "help" folder with the "manual" folder inside that.
 * 2) Upload the audacity-manual-.zip onto Google code http://code.google.com/p/audacity for use by the people making installers etc.
 * 3) Mark any previous rc as 'Deprecated'.
 * 4) Make sure that people are aware of the upload, and any new ones that are done, including
 * 5) RM
 * 6) People making installers etc.

When the release happens, rename audacity-manual-.zip as the final version (for example audacity-manual-2.0.1.zip).

Unused/optional step
(The following step has not been used for recent Win builds, but has been left here for historical reasons.)

A currently optional step, at least for beta builds, is to reduce the size of the manual by reducing the size of the .png files. A way to do this on Windows with ImageMagick installed is shown as a batch script below, started from the image directory:

FOR /R %%a IN (*.png) DO mogrify -posterize 64 %%a FOR /R %%a IN (*.png) DO convert -quality 90 %%a %%a

This reduces the number of colors to 64 and then uses a hint to the .png compressor to be aggressive about compression. The %%a works on Win7. Martyn found that %a was needed instead on his platform (Win XP?). This reduces total images size from about 12Mb to about 5.2Mb. Some of the largest files are already being replaced on the wiki. If we do the whole wiki, then this step can be removed. If someone wants to post the equivalent script for Linux that would be appreciated.