| Re: Help with help files. [message #6980 is a reply to message #6901] |
Thu, 05 September 1996 00:00   |
David Foster
Messages: 341
Registered: January 1996
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Senior Member |
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Dyer Lytle wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering how people handle on-line documentation in IDL.
> We have developed about 8 different applications in IDL that we
> distribute to our user base of about 40 people at various locations
> and each of these applications has associated with it one or more
> online "help" files. Currently, we ask our users to define their
> "IDL_PATH" so that IDL can find the various tasks to execute and
> we have them define a directory called "IDL_DOC" that we reference
> whenever we call "xdisplayfile" from an application, i.e.
>
> CASE event OF
>
> 'help': BEGIN
> xdisplayfile,'$IDL_DOC/example.hlp'
> END
>
> Does anyone know a way to somehow use "IDL_PATH" to find this
> documentation rather then useing a seperate environmental variable?
> Or perhaps someone has a better approach to IDL on-line documentation?
If you include $IDL_DOC or one of its parent directories in IDL_PATH
and then put a single file with the .pro extension in the directory,
IDL will find it. It does not include directories that do not contain
any .pro files.
We use a similar scheme for help files, and I've written a program
that you can call to explicitly display a certain help file, or choose
from a list of help files. It also lets you look at .pro files as an
option. You can search for text in the file, which is pretty useful.
The one big difference is this program expects to find the help files
in the same directories as the .pro files. If you think this might
be useful or something you could modify, let me know and I'll send
you a copy.
Dave
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~
David S. Foster Univ. of California, San Diego
Programmer/Analyst Brain Image Analysis Laboratory
foster@bial1.ucsd.edu Department of Psychiatry
(619) 622-5892 8950 Via La Jolla Drive, Suite 2200
La Jolla, CA 92037
[ UCSD Mail Code 0949 ]
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