Searching in the Help System

There are two ways to search for content within the IDL help system: using the index and using the full text search.

The index is created by the authors of IDL's help content. It corresponds to the index you would find at the back of a printed book. In general, the index provdes a more selective and highly targeted way to search for content than the full text search. Use the Index tab to locate items in the index.

The full text search mechanism does a brute-force search through the documentation content for matching terms. While this mechanism is often useful, it can also provide a larger number of "hits" than you want. You can control the number of results to a degree by choosing your search terms carefully and by Limiting Search Results.