| Cool Help! [message #31403] |
Mon, 08 July 2002 07:53  |
btupper
Messages: 55
Registered: January 2002
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Member |
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Hello,
You may recall a while back that I had a thorn under my saddle
regarding the IDL online help (in particular for IDL 5.5 which was
padded on as a PDF.) Some folk passed along ideas about what might
be nice for future online help system, and I faithfully sent those
ideas along to RSI. I hope I sent them to the right place but I have
no idea since I received no response.
In the meantime, Andrew Cool had been cooking up a method for
extracting the online help text (including that for IDL 5.5) via that
neato IDL 5.5 HTML help files that David is hosting at his website. I
still don't know who crafted that.
We have now wrapped Andew's query routine with a GUI wrapper. The GUI
provides an alphabetical index, a routine list, a 'See Also' list, and
the help text for the queried routine. The GUI is object based but
the object is stored in a system variable for easy access.
You can retrieve the three necessary files from...
www.tidewater.net/~pemaquid/coolhelp.zip
Simply unzip all three files into your !PATH and then
IDL> ch
or
IDL> ch, 'uniq' ;or whatever routine you would like to see
You might need to reset your session before it will work and you
*WILL* need to have
(1) Martin Schultz's MGS_BASEOBJECT
http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/~schultz.martin/idl/index.html
and
(2) David Fanning's COYOTE_PROGRAMS.ZIP
http://www.dfanning.com/documents/programs/coyoteprograms.zi p
This package has been tested on WIN98 and Win2000. Please direct
comments and suggestions to Andrew at andrew.cool@dsto.defence.gov.au
or to me at pemaquidriver@tidewater.net.
Regards,
Ben
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| Re: Cool Help! [message #31468 is a reply to message #31403] |
Wed, 10 July 2002 14:54  |
R.Bauer
Messages: 1424
Registered: November 1998
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Senior Member |
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Dear Ben,
I got an error by downloading the zip file.
Not Found
The requested URL /~pemaquid/coolhelp.zip was not found on this server.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at www.tidewater.net Port 80
How far is the gen_write and gen_read for Labview?
cheers
Reimar
Ben Tupper wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> You may recall a while back that I had a thorn under my saddle
> regarding the IDL online help (in particular for IDL 5.5 which was
> padded on as a PDF.) Some folk passed along ideas about what might
> be nice for future online help system, and I faithfully sent those
> ideas along to RSI. I hope I sent them to the right place but I have
> no idea since I received no response.
>
> In the meantime, Andrew Cool had been cooking up a method for
> extracting the online help text (including that for IDL 5.5) via that
> neato IDL 5.5 HTML help files that David is hosting at his website. I
> still don't know who crafted that.
>
> We have now wrapped Andew's query routine with a GUI wrapper. The GUI
> provides an alphabetical index, a routine list, a 'See Also' list, and
> the help text for the queried routine. The GUI is object based but
> the object is stored in a system variable for easy access.
>
> You can retrieve the three necessary files from...
>
> www.tidewater.net/~pemaquid/coolhelp.zip
>
> Simply unzip all three files into your !PATH and then
>
> IDL> ch
>
> or
>
> IDL> ch, 'uniq' ;or whatever routine you would like to see
>
> You might need to reset your session before it will work and you
> *WILL* need to have
>
> (1) Martin Schultz's MGS_BASEOBJECT
>
> http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/~schultz.martin/idl/index.html
>
> and
>
> (2) David Fanning's COYOTE_PROGRAMS.ZIP
>
> http://www.dfanning.com/documents/programs/coyoteprograms.zi p
>
> This package has been tested on WIN98 and Win2000. Please direct
> comments and suggestions to Andrew at andrew.cool@dsto.defence.gov.au
> or to me at pemaquidriver@tidewater.net.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ben
--
Reimar Bauer
Institut fuer Stratosphaerische Chemie (ICG-I)
Forschungszentrum Juelich
email: R.Bauer@fz-juelich.de
------------------------------------------------------------ -------
a IDL library at ForschungsZentrum Juelich
http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg1/idl_icglib/idl_lib_intro.h tml
============================================================ =======
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| Re: Cool Help! [message #31545 is a reply to message #31403] |
Tue, 16 July 2002 13:38 |
JD Smith
Messages: 850
Registered: December 1999
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Senior Member |
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On Mon, 08 Jul 2002 07:53:47 -0700, Ben Tupper wrote:
> Hello,
>
> You may recall a while back that I had a thorn under my saddle regarding
> the IDL online help (in particular for IDL 5.5 which was padded on as a
> PDF.) Some folk passed along ideas about what might be nice for future
> online help system, and I faithfully sent those ideas along to RSI. I
> hope I sent them to the right place but I have no idea since I received
> no response.
> In the meantime, Andrew Cool had been cooking up a method for extracting
> the online help text (including that for IDL 5.5) via that neato IDL 5.5
> HTML help files that David is hosting at his website. I still don't
> know who crafted that
The help text came from IDLWAVE, the Emacs IDL programming/shell mode
(idlwave.org), which uses it for it's own internal fast text-help system.
The massive perl script get_rinfo does the heavy lifting, but relies on
the excellent pdftotext program by Derek Noonburg to extract raw text from
RSI's PDF help files. It also flags and corrects typoes, inserts updated
documentation that RSI was too lazy to integrate themselves ;), normalizes
calling sequences, etc. It employs all manner of crufty techniques to
digest this inconsistent data pile, to pare it down to something useful.
However, since get_rinfo creates lisp-indexed files for use by IDLWAVE,
converting the idlw-help.txt file it creates to HTML is somewhat
roundabout. It would be easy enough to take get_rinfo as a base, and, in
perl, create a full HTML-izer for RSI's PDF help texts which is rather
more optimal than the by-hand-from-ascii method Andrew employed. You
could create full indices, nicely-layed-out tables, cross-references
within help documents, etc.
If anyone is interested, get_rinfo is available as part of the IDLWAVE
package at idlwave.org.
JD
P.S. The other option is to bug RSI to include full HTML versions of
their help system... this may not be as hopeless as you'd guess.
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