Re: Any way to make help browser remember the last position?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg98772] Re: Any way to make help browser remember the last position?
- From: mike.honeychurch at gmail.com
- Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 03:40:09 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <gs1nro$7h5$1@smc.vnet.net> <gs47in$7m5$1@smc.vnet.net>
On Apr 16, 3:13 am, AES <sieg... at stanford.edu> wrote: > > sean_inc... 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 an= d > > > 5. > > and article <gs47in$7m... at smc.vnet.net>, > jka <j_korthals_al... 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.] One of the great things about the help browser is that you can evaluate code so that not only do you get help, you can interactively experiment in order to gain a better understanding. You can't do that in a PDF. Mike