About the IDL Workbench Help Topics

The IDL help system consists of topics that fall into three main categories:

Topics describing IDL itself — language reference material, programmer's information, and information describing how to use the IDL application and associated utilities.

Topics describing the portions of the IDL Workbench created by ITT Visual Information Solutions — interface elements and workflows that we have added to customize the Eclipse framework for use with IDL.

Topics describing the portions of the IDL Workbench provided by Eclipse — interface elements and workflows that the IDL Workbench inherits unchanged from the underlying Eclipse framework.

Topics in the first category — those describing IDL itself — make up the vast majority of the IDL help system. These topics are collected under several top-level topics (IDL API Reference Guides, IDL User's Guides, etc.) in the Table of Contents tab of the help browser.

Topics in the second and third categories — dealing with the IDL Workbench — are commingled under a single top-level topic titled IDL Workbench Guide. Since much of the functionality of the IDL Workbench comes directly from the Eclipse Workbench, we have chosen to reuse the workbench documentation included with the Eclipse distribution. In cases where we have added new features, we have created additional topics and merged them with the Eclipse documentation.

You'll be able to discern which topics are which in the following ways:

Topics created to describe the IDL Workbench show up with a white background. A grey bar at the bottom right contains the following links:


	Send a comment on the current topic to the IDL documentation team
	Show the previous topic
	Scroll to the top of this topic
	Show the next topic

Note
Moving to the next or previous topic using these navigational links moves through the IDL-specific workbench topics, ignoring the order of the topics shown in the help browser's Table of Contents.

Topics from the Eclipse documentation show up with a light yellow background, and do not include the grey bar. These topics may also refer to Eclipse features not present in the IDL Workbench.

Tell Us What You Think

Each topic describing IDL functionality includes a hyperlink titled "Send us a comment on this topic" in the grey bar at the bottom of the screen. If you click this link, the help browser will attempt to launch your electronic mail program, creating a new message with some information about the topic. Simply add your comments and send the message.

The "Send us a comment on this topic" link uses a mailto hypertext link to open your mail program. If your system does not have an electronic mail program defined to accept links of this type, you may see a dialog informing you that no program is available.