About IDL's Online Help System

Beginning with IDL version 7.0, IDL's context-sensitive online help system is built on the user assistance infrastructure provided by the Eclipse framework on which the IDL Workbench is built. Help content for IDL is provided in a set of help plugins — .jar archives that contain HTML help content files and XML documents that control how the content is presented.

IDL's online help system is described in detail from a user's point of view in Using IDL Help — located, appropriately enough, in the IDL online help system.

In IDL 7.0, it is not possible for IDL developers to write help content to be displayed in IDL's own help system. We hope to provide this capability to IDL developers in a future release. In the meantime, see Using Other Online Help Viewers for options on providing help for your IDL applications.