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Re: How to bring up specific doc page programmatically?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg114508] Re: How to bring up specific doc page programmatically?
• From: Albert Retey <awnl at gmx-topmail.de>
• Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2010 21:58:43 -0500 (EST)
• References: <idagaa$jqh$1@smc.vnet.net> <idd7va$nlo$1@smc.vnet.net>

Hi,

> In <idagaa$jqh$1 at smc.vnet.net> Patrick Scheibe <pscheibe at trm.uni-leipzig.de> writes:
> 
>> and since these are all notebooks, something like
> 
>> NotebookOpen["paclet:ref/List"]
> 
>> should work too.
> 
> "Should"?  If I had a dime for every time that Mathematica refuses
> to do what it "should" do (based on my understanding of it), I'd
> be a lot richer than Wolfram!  :)

There is a point in what you say, there are many subtleties that are not
sufficiently detailed in the documentation. On the other hand, I would
to some extent suggest that it might also be your understanding of it
that might fool you every here and then...

> I've learned that when working with Mathematica, one always, always,
> always has to "do the experiment".  Deductive reasoning doesn't go
> very far with it.  It is the height of irony that, despite the name
> "Mathematica", working with it remains very much an *experimental*
> science. :D 
> 
> (FWIW, the expression you posted evaluates to $Failed and beeps
> when I run it.)

What version are you using? From my experiments (as an educated
physicist, I have no problem with that :-)),
NotebookOpen["paclet:ref/List"] will only work with version 8, but not
with version 7 or lower. I didn't find that this will work in the
documentation of NotebookOpen neither in version 7 nor version 8, so we
are left with guessing whether that working is the intended behaviour or
just an incident...

hth,

albert