Documentation Enhancements

The following enhancements have been made to IDL's documentation and online help system in the IDL 7.1 release:

See Using IDL Help in the IDL help system for a complete description of the IDL help interface.

Better Ranking of Search Results

Note
This enhancement was released as part of the IDL Workbench 7.0.3 update. If you installed that update, you will not see any additional change in behavior in IDL 7.1.

In IDL 7.0, the Search feature of the IDL Online Help used a default search result ranking algorithm that produced poor results when searching for reference documentation on IDL routines. In particular, many links to reference topics were ranked low in the result listing, while less obviously useful topics appeared at the top.

The search result ranking algorithm has been adjusted so that entering the name of an IDL routine in the Search field places the link to that routine's reference page at or near the top of the result list.

Note that the state of the Show Result Categories button () can also influence where in the list of search results an entry appears. Turning the search result categories on can also help you determine what type of topic your search term appears in.

Tip
Entering a ? and the name of an IDL routine at the IDL command line will display the reference documentation for the specified routine directly, without searching.

Active Example Code

Note
This enhancement was released as part of the IDL Workbench 7.0.3 update. If you installed that update, you will not see any additional change in behavior in IDL 7.1.

If you start the IDL Online Help from within the IDL Workbench (as opposed to starting it from an IDL command line session), you will find many blocks of example code that have been highlighted in blue. Clicking on these example blocks will execute the code immediately in IDL.

Note
Not all example code has been made active. The process of making the code blocks active will continue in future releases.

F1 Help

Note
This enhancement was released as part of the IDL Workbench 7.0.3 update. If you installed that update, you will not see any additional change in behavior in IDL 7.1.

You can display information about text inside an editor, the Console view, or the IDL Command Line view by selecting text (or placing the cursor inside a word) and pressing F1. Information about the word or topic is displayed in the IDL Online Help system. You can display the same information by selecting Help → Help on Selected Item.

The F1 key binding works on all platforms. You can choose a different key to display help on the selected item by opening the General → Keys preference page (or by pressing Ctrl-Shift-L twice), and changing the key binding for the Help on Selected Item command.