Overview of Creating Application Help

IDL gives you the ability to display help information for your applications, routines, etc. using a variety of mechanisms:

Using tooltips, status bars, and text widgets to display small amounts of help information within an application's interface.

Using the XDISPLAYFILE procedure to display text files in an IDL window separate from your application.

Using the SPAWN procedure to display a file in an external editor or viewer.

Using IDL's own online help facilities, via the ONLINE_HELP procedure, to display Windows Help files, Adobe Portable Document Format files, or HTML files.

These techniques vary in complexity, cost, and level of integration with IDL and your own application. The following sections describe each option in detail.