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Re: Any way to make help browser remember the last position?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg98679] Re: Any way to make help browser remember the last position?
  • From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
  • Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:13:45 -0400 (EDT)
  • Organization: Stanford University
  • References: <gs1nro$7h5$1@smc.vnet.net> <gs47in$7m5$1@smc.vnet.net>

> sean_incali at yahoo.com wrote:
> > What bugs me, no, drives me mad, is the fact that, every time I press
> > F1 key to invoke the help or 'documentation center,' it goes straight
> > to the center of the screen instead of to the right like it did v4 and
> > 5.
> > 
 
and article <gs47in$7m5$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
 jka <j_korthals_altes at yahoo.co.in> replies:

> I am very interested in what makes people mad. The Linux version of 
> Mathematica 7.0.1.0 I use leaves the help browser in place as long as 
> you don't close it. So an easy advise for your problem would be: don't 
> close the help browser. If you want to hide using it, place an other 
> window over it.


If the Help material (and other documentation) for Mathematica were 
written and displayed in another app and format (like, for example, 
Adobe PDF), as is the case with most other major applications, you could 
jump back and forth between your active Mathematica windows and your 
currently active documentation window(s), leaving both of them 
absolutely stable and unchanged in between viewings, with a single 
keystroke, Cmd-Tab (on a Mac, anyway).

Works like a charm; I do it all the time with other apps.  And, 
documentation in the form of a PDF file can be scanned, viewed, 
searched, enlarged, read, and generally used _immensely_ more 
effectively and easily in, say, Adobe Acrobat (or probably Reader, 
though I don't use that) than documentation in Mathematica's cramped and 
awkward format.

[Of course, one can only imagine what documentation for, say Excel, 
would be like, if MS insisted that _all_ the documentation for Excel 
also had to be _written_ only in Excel . . . ]

[Did I add, that selected pages or sections of documentation in PDF can 
also be printed out, if you'd prefer to have a few particularly relevant 
pages of the documentation sitting on your (physical) desktop, beside 
your keyboard -- where you can just glance over at it, without having to 
close or open anything on screen.]


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