The OpenLayers Developer Documentation (API docs) do not require network access. Each release of OpenLayers is provided in two forms: with and without documentation. The with documentation build is much larger (about twice as large), but includes pre-built versions of all documentation, in the ‘doc’ directory. These are available from the OpenLayers Download Page.

It still requires a web browser, but the documentation is fully usable offline.

At this time, our API documentation is generated by NaturalDocs, which has no PDF generation option. Because of the way the code works, I’m somewhat skeptical that it will be added at any point in the near future. However, if the goal is just “viewing offline”, I think our existing documentation works okay.

Does this solve your problem?

To more directly address your question regarding getting help working on docs: I’m always available on IRC to answer questions, and especially if you tell me you’re writing docs, I’m very helpful/friendly

I agree that the existing OpenLayers documentation for beginners is poor. Part of this is that the *language* documentation is terrible: there is nothing even close to resembling a good Javascript reference guide, so most users are trying to learn two things at once from the OpenLayers docs — Javascript, *and* OpenLayers. This is a pretty crappy problem for a project like OpenLayers to try to be solving, but I agree that at least some beginner tutorialing in this regard would help.

That said, I’m definitely of the opinion that OpenLayers could use more prose documentation of the beginner sort. Some of this is actually improved significantly by the intro-to-openlayers workshop that OpenGeo put together:

English | French

This material provides a good starting point for working with OpenLayers for the first time, and provides some really useful overview. I appreciate that OpenGeo put it together, though I am finding myself frustrated by the number of people who have put together documentation, then put no effort into bringing it back to the OpenLayers community directly.

There is obviously much more to do in this regard: the OpenGeo workshop is great as a workshop, but doesn’t translate as nicely into setting up your own as it could, and we obviously have a lot more functionality in OpenLayers to document.

There seems to be a statement drawn by the post from whit: “OpenLayers has bad docs because developers don’t know that good docs are important.” Good docs are extremely important. OpenLayers, as a project, has invested probably more than 100 man-hours in docs. (I know that I’ve invested 30+ on my own — I spent a whole weekend doing the natural docs conversion, and I was far from alone.) Yes, they’re still insufficient, and yes, they could use more work — but that doesn’t mean we’re ignoring them. These things are hard to solve, and require a major investment. No one — no organization, no individual, no team of people — has made a major investment in OpenLayers docs, and until they do, things will continue to be the way they are.

Some organizations have put forth a number of minor investments: it’s my goal to get these things integrated into OpenLayers documentation, but I’ve not seen anyone else in the core community express interest in it. Even OpenGeo didn’t offer a helping hand in making this happen — despite clearly investing in their OpenLayers workshop, it took more than a month before I had the chance to propose tighter integration into the OpenLayers website, and still received no assistance from anyone other than myself. This says to me that — to some extent — these organizations are not “investing in OpenLayers” in this way, but are simply investing in themselves. This is a fair choice — no organization can take on OpenLayers as their own requirements — but to ignore the efforts of people who *are* investing in it in the way that the post did was frustrating to see.

I think what OpenLayers lacks the most is a document that goes over the design concepts behind OpenLayers components like controls, panels, handlers etc. Like if I wanted to create a custom layer class OpenLayers what are the steps to do so and simpler things like what CSS styles will be applied to toolbar items in various states by default are also not documented anywhere that I could find. If there were some sample walk throughs that go over how to some simple tools that use the mouse and key board handlers would be amazingly useful. I would be willing to contribute to some of that samples and walk throughs if there is somebody I can ping and get help and clarifications.

Thank You,
Vish