Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
A few IDL versions ago, an integrated help system called idl_assistant was bundled as part of IDL. It was based on the QT widget toolkit and you could not only use it to view online documentation from the IDL development environment but also integrate it in your own IDL application so your end users could view documentation or user manuals that you have written for the application. Sadly this feature was dropped in later versions of IDL even though I kept using it with my application that was based on IDL 8.0 by simply copying the idl_assistant from an older IDL distribution. I have recently upgraded to IDL 8.5 and the idl_assistant from an older distribution no longer works! So I have a major problem regarding how to integrated documentation/manuals along with my application in the same way that idl_assistant did. I also have all this documentation that is written in xml+html in a way that provides context help. This is so frustrating. Since idl_assistant was not replaced how should we include context help in our own applications built on IDL 8.5? Using monolithic PDF help files just does not cut it! I know some Exelis folks read this forum hence I would be grateful if one of them can provide some insight here. Richard