diff --git a/tools/offline/README.md b/tools/offline/README.md
index b8a6f3bcd2..cb4b505fc2 100644
--- a/tools/offline/README.md
+++ b/tools/offline/README.md
@@ -2,14 +2,13 @@
 
 In some situations it might be necessary to build LAMMPS on a system without
 internet. The scripts in this folder allow you to preload external dependencies
-for both the documentation build for building with CMake into a folder and then
-use that folder on an offline system.
+for both the documentation build and for building with CMake.
 
 It does so by
 
-1.) Downloading necessary pip packages
-2.) Cloning git repositories
-3.) Downloading tarballs
+1. Downloading necessary pip packages
+2. Cloning git repositories
+3. Downloading tarballs
 
 As of April 2021, all of these downloads make up around 600MB.  By
 default, it will download everything into $HOME/.cache/lammps, but this can be
@@ -22,28 +21,30 @@ The ``use_caches.sh`` must be sourced into the current shell to initialize the
 offline build environment. Note that it must use the same ``LAMMPS_CACHING_DIR``.
 This script does the following:
 
-1.) Sets up environment variables that modify the behavior of both pip and git
-2.) Starts a simple local HTTP server to host files for CMake
+1. Sets up environment variables that modify the behavior of both pip and git
+2. Starts a simple local HTTP server to host files for CMake
 
 Afterwards, it will print out instruction on how to modify the CMake command
 line to make sure it uses the local HTTP server.
 
-To undo the environment changes and shutdown the HTTP server, run the
+To undo the environment changes and shutdown the local HTTP server, run the
 ``deactivate_caches`` command.
 
 ## Examples
 
-For all of the examples below, you first need to create the cache (which requires internet).
+For all of the examples below, you first need to create the cache, which requires an internect connection.
 
 ```bash
 ./tools/offline/init_caches.sh
 ```
 
-Afterwards, you can disconnect or copy the contents of the
-``LAMMPS_CACHING_DIR`` folder to an offline system.
+Afterwards, you can disconnect or copy the contents of the ``LAMMPS_CACHING_DIR`` folder to an offline system.
 
 ### Documentation
 
+The documentation build will create a new virtual environment that typically first installs dependencies from pip.
+With the offline environment loaded, these installations will instead grab the necessary packages from your local cache.
+
 ```bash
 # if LAMMPS_CACHING_DIR is different from default, make sure to set it first
 # export LAMMPS_CACHING_DIR=path/to/folder
@@ -56,6 +57,10 @@ deactivate_caches
 
 ### CMake Build
 
+When compiling certain packages with external dependencies, the CMake build system will download some things from the web.
+For more flexibility it allows users to specify the URL of each of these dependencies. What the ``init_caches.sh`` script does is
+create a CMake preset file, which sets the URL for all of the known dependencies and redirects the download to a local cache.
+
 ```bash
 # if LAMMPS_CACHING_DIR is different from default, make sure to set it first
 # export LAMMPS_CACHING_DIR=path/to/folder