Am I remembering correctly that v12 had a local .chm?
PDF is meh.
A local chm would grand. They can be searched so much quicker than thru a web browser using gigs of ram.
CHM is unfortunately a dead format, with the viewer never updated for things like high DPI and I think removed from newer versions of Windows.
(Since Microsoft no longer document anything, they see no reason to maintain a documentation viewer which is only used by thousands of other programs.)
There also aren’t any good tools for editing CHM.
fair enough, typical of MS, they can't sell TV commercials in chm?? 
none the less. some sort of offline\local help doc would be wonderful.
If the dev team is totally OK with it, you or whoever is interested could scrape the manual to create a working local copy, or even a PDF.
There's a tool called DokuWikiDumper that does something similar, but I think it's meant for other purposes; while it does generate a complete copy of all the pages of a website, they aren't interconnected, so it's not very practical for this purpose.