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Offline Reference
Since the start of the project, we've included an offline copy of the reference with the software, which powers “Find in Reference” and the links in the Help menu. This is especially helpful/important for people with lower internet availability (i.e for situations where internet is disconnected, slow, or expensive).
With the site redesign launched in 2021, the size of the reference.zip file had jumped from 4.2 MB to about 100 MB, which meant it was far too large to include it with the download. For the initial release of 4.0 in August 2022, the offline reference was removed and we linked to the online reference.
With Processing 4.1 (late November 2022), a “Download Offline Reference” item was added to the Help Menu, which takes care of downloading an offline copy. It creates a file called reference.zip in the sketchbook. If that file is present, then the Help menu links and Find in Reference will use that copy of the reference. If it is not present, online URLs will be used.
You can also manually copy the reference.zip file from sketchbook to sketchbook. Put reference.zip in the root of your sketchbook and restart Processing so that it picks up the new file. For instance, in a class situation, you might put the file on a shared server and tell people where to find it.
The download size is around 66 MB. We would still like it to be smaller, and if we can get it down to around 10 MB, we can include it in the download again, and get rid of the “Download Offline Reference” option.
Needing to manually download the reference is not an ideal situation: for many users, being offline is when they realize they need an offline reference, but at least the current situation is better than not any options at all, or increasing the download size by more than 25%.
This is a high priority for us. Certainly many people had no idea that the offline reference is available at all, but there are also many people who rely on it, particularly those in important communities for us (users outside the US, limited internet resources, and so on).