Documentation in PDF Format
The IDL documentation set is available in a set of Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The PDF documentation set is hyperlinked, provides navigational bookmarks in the bookmarks pane, and provides a compiled full-text search index.
Adobe Systems Inc. created the Portable Document Format in the early 1990s, basing it on their PostScript language. PDF is intended to allow documents to be displayed in exactly the same manner on a wide variety of computing platforms.
The IDL PDF files are electronic representations of the individual books in the documentation set, and can be either viewed on screen or printed (in full or in part) on a local printer. When viewed on-screen, the PDF books provide hyperlinked cross-references, tables of contents, and indices, allowing for speedy navigation through the set. In addition, some versions of the Adobe Acrobat software provide a fast full-text search capability, using a pre-compiled full-text index of the entire document set.
Viewing PDF Files
Viewing PDF files requires a separate application, not included in the IDL installation. Various PDF viewing applications are in wide use, and one or more may already be installed on your system.
The PDF version of the IDL documentation set is designed to be viewed using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader. Other third-party PDF viewers (notably GhostScript and Apple's Preview) are available, but these viewers may not support all of the features available when viewing the IDL PDF files in Adobe Acrobat. Inter-document hyperlinks may or may not work correctly when using other viewers, and the compiled full-text search index (the Acrobat "Search" feature) will almost surely not work correctly in other viewers.
The Adobe Reader software is available at no charge directly from Adobe:
Locating the PDF Documentation Set
The PDF version of the documentation set is not installed with IDL. The PDF files are located in the info/docs subdirectory of the IDL installation DVD. See the readme.txt file in that directory for information on installing the PDF files.
