A note about the KiCad documentation / user manual

The KiCad user documentation is available both online and as part of the released versions of KiCad at the moment. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough volunteers writing documentation and so the state of the documentation often lags behind the state of the software development.

Going forward, we will be continuously updating the documentation for each release series on the website at https://docs.kicad.org/ rather than only updating this website when a new stable release comes out. This will mean that additions and fixes to the documentation can be made between stable releases.

Obviously, we cannot do the same for the documentation that is distributed with KiCad software releases (aka the offline documentation). It will therefore remain out-of-date in general. We are not that happy about having to release out-of-date documentation, and are considering future options including paid documentation writers and removing the offline documentation entirely in order to focus on keeping the “live” online documentation up-to-date (no decisions have been made here).

What this means for the user community is:

  • Continue to direct people to the website (https://docs.kicad.org) to find the user manual rather than using documentation that is installed as part of KiCad. It will always be more up-to-date.
  • Make sure to check the documentation branch (at the top right) of the website and choose the correct branch. At the time of making this post, there isn’t a 6.0 option yet, but there will be soon.
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