Accessing all the documentation in Help

[John Browne]

Recently there has been some discussion on the Group about the new
Help in 6.

For those who would like to see all the documentation pages that are
included in the application on your machine, I have found the
following works well for me. The discussion is for Mac OS X, but I
expect something similar would work in Unix or Windows.

Essentially, the process is to simply copy the documentation files
out of the application onto your desktop where you can scan them all
and open them separately as notebooks. There are a lot!

In Mac OS X:
Quit Mathematica.
Locate the Mathematica 6 application icon. (Mac OS X calls this a
"package")
Click on it while holding down the Control key to get a menu.
Choose "Show Package Contents"
Search through these folders for the documentation you want, and copy
it to somewhere convenient outside the application.
Close the Mathematica 6 folder.
That's it.

I have copied out all the Guides, Tutorials, and documentation for
packages, built in symbols, menu items, characters, and front-end
objects.

In Mac OS X, you can even put all this documentation in one folder
and view it hierarchically in the Finder (rightmost view option) to
get a facility that acts somewhat like the old 5.2 Help Browser.

And even from these copies, the Search field still works.

It's amazing what is there. My guess is that much of the Mathematica
Book relevant to 6 is also there in one form or another.

John

[Selwyn Hollis]

On a related note, my "Help Helper" palette now works on PCs as well
as Macs. (Thanks, Bobby.)

http://www.math.armstrong.edu/faculty/hollis/HelpHelperPalette.nb

-- Selwyn