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From: finn@theory.tn.cornell.edu (Lee Samuel Finn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Why doesn't Mathematica's help work?
Message-ID: <1991May13.171008.5267@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: 13 May 91 17:10:08 GMT
References: <1427@actisb.UUCP> <pf.h0.m@rpi.edu>
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In article <pf.h0.m@rpi.edu> gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) writes:
>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...)

I tried this after the suggestion was posted the first time, and it
didn't do a thing for me.