Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rpi!usenet From: gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Why doesn't Mathematica's help work? Message-ID: Date: 13 May 91 16:10:33 GMT References: <1427@actisb.UUCP> Lines: 27 Nntp-Posting-Host: eclipse.its.rpi.edu In comp.sys.next article <1427@actisb.UUCP> federico@actisb.UUCP (Federico Heinz) wrote: > Well, FAQ and NextAnswers checked, here's one for you: on my > machine, Mathematica's help function won't work. Neither the > '?'-cursor, nor any Help-Button in any panel, nor Help on > Selection... nothing. I get the help panel, sure, but it has > no information in it---the text field is just empty! Yeah. There's some kind of bug in Mathematica and system 2.0. I believe they were surprised it worked at all. The new version of Mathematica should solve that of course (when it is available). I suspect that if we were smart enough we could probably patch the program or the help panel or something so it would work. When I found out about this problem I discovered one helpful thing. When the help panel comes up, click in the slider bar (where the slider would be if the panel realized it had text to view). The help magically appears. The problem is it's going to show you the help for wherever you clicked the slider bar, which probably won't be the section of help that you would have seen if the panel just worked in the first place. - - - - - - - - Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@rpi.edu or gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu ITS Systems Programmer (handles NeXT-type mail) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy NY USA (note: I tried mailing a reply but that didn't seem to work...)