idlwave: Documentation Scan
A.5 Documentation Scan
======================
*Starting with version 6.2, IDL is distributed directly with HTML online
help, and an XML-based catalog of routine information*. This makes
scanning the manuals with the tool ‘get_html_rinfo’, and the
‘idlw-rinfo.el’ file it produced, as described here, entirely
unnecessary. The information is left here for users wishing to produce
a catalog of older IDL versions’ help.
IDLWAVE derives its knowledge about system routines from the IDL
manuals. The file ‘idlw-rinfo.el’ contains the routine information for
the IDL system routines, and links to relevant sections of the HTML
documentation. The Online Help feature of IDLWAVE requires HTML
versions of the IDL manuals to be available; the HTML documentation is
not distributed with IDLWAVE by default, but must be downloaded
separately.
The HTML files and related images can be produced from the ‘idl.chm’
HTMLHelp file distributed with IDL using the free Microsoft HTML Help
Workshop. If you are lucky, the maintainer of IDLWAVE will always have
access to the newest version of IDL and provide updates. The IDLWAVE
distribution also contains the Perl program ‘get_html_rinfo’ which
constructs the ‘idlw-rinfo.el’ file by scanning the HTML documents
produced from the IDL documentation. Instructions on how to use
‘get_html_rinfo’ are in the program itself.
Info Catalog
idlwave: Load-Path Shadows
idlwave: Sources of Routine Info