Download PDF Learning Guides

Frozen Content

Modified by Admin on Sep 13, 2017

Parent article: System Installation, Licensing & Management

The PDF Learning Guides are deemed to be 'frozen documentation'. Their content has not, nor will not, be updated. Documents that are still accurate today may become inaccurate in the future as changes take place to information within the techdocs site. Care should be taken when using these Learning Guides as a reference, and it is advised to use the techdocs site to ensure that you are using the most up-to-date documentation set.

The techdocs site (techdocs.altium.com) is the home of the latest documentation for Altium's Design solutions. It is here that the latest features are documented as new articles, and updates applied to existing articles as the software improves. The techdocs site can be thought of as THE master set of documentation – your destination for information on Altium Designer, AltiumLive, Altium Designer Viewer, the Altium Instrument Dashboard, and Altium Hardware.

While techdocs is the home of documentation for Altium's Design solutions, the PDF-based Learning Guides are still available for designers who need an off-line solution.

Altium Designer 13/12/10 still caters for access to these PDF Learning Guides through internal navigation pages and the Knowledge Center panel. PDF documents can be searched, set the search scope to Search Local Documents at the bottom of the Knowledge Center panel.

These Learning Guides fall into one of two categories:

Still Accurate – a Learning Guide belongs to this category if, in comparison to its techdocs-based successor, its content is considered to be still accurate. In some cases, the content is identical. This would typically be the case where no further update has taken place since the document's content was migrated to techdocs. In other cases, differences between the PDF document and the corresponding techdocs page(s) are deemed to be minimal or slight. In other cases still, migrated content may not yet be truly converted to the online format, resulting in the PDF document still being used as a reference. These 'Still Accurate' documents have been given a fresh template, utilizing a black and gold look and feel.

Legacy – a Learning Guide belongs to this category if, in comparison to its techdocs-based successor, its content is considered to be either: Inaccurate (the techdocs version has been greatly updated, for example with newer information, and the PDF contains information that is no longer accurate with today's software (slipped too much out of date)); for use with older version(s) of Altium Designer (and therefore not relevant to Altium Designer 10 or later); for use with design components marked specifically as 'legacy' (such as 8-bit processors, peripherals and instruments for FPGA design, and available in legacy libraries). The latter would be considered still accurate, but rendered legacy from its design use perspective. These 'Legacy' documents remain using their original template, utilizing a blue look and feel, and carry a watermark to reinforce their legacy status.

No PDF documentation ships with Altium Designer 14 (or later). Altium Designer 13/12/10 ships with a minimal set of these PDF documents – 22 in fact, included in the Help - FPGA plugin, part of the Documentation Packages category of plugins.

The complete set of PDF documents can be downloaded using the following link:

Download all PDF Learning Guides

If using Altium Designer 13/12/10, you can simply unzip and drop the files into the \Help folder of your installation. You may get a warning about file replacement conflicts, resolve these in favor of the contents of the ZIP file. Within Altium Designer, links to PDF documentation will only become active once the relevant PDF document(s) have been dropped into the \Help folder.