Help files won't load in Mathematica 11

[Bill N]

Hi,

I can't get any xAct documentation to display in Mathematica 11 Home Edition, running on Windows 10.  I'm new to xAct, so maybe I've just set it up wrong.  Unzipped the full xAct package download into the ProgramData/Mathematica/Applications folder, with ProgramData/Mathematica identified using the $BaseDirectory command.  The <<xAct`xTensor` command loads up xTensor just fine, and "xAct Packages >>" is displayed in the "Installed Add-Ons" listing in the Documentation Center.

But clicking on the "xAct Packages >>" link pops up a dialog box with the following error messages displayed (with some time stamps not listed here):

Could not process unknown packet "HelpBrowserGetListBoxList".

Could not process unknown packet "HelpBrowserLookup".

Could not process unknown packet "HelpBrowserSetListBoxItem".

That's as far as it goes.  Did a search for these packets on the whole computer, but nothing found.  I'm stumped.

Any help on this is of course greatly appreciated.  xAct seems like a powerful tool too good to be without.

Thanks,

Bill

[Thomas Bäckdahl]

Hi Bill

Thank you for the bug report. I have to admit that I have never accessed the xAct documentation through the Documentation Center even though I am one of the developers.
The responsible file for the documentation menu is
xAct\Documentation\English\BrowserCategories.m
which has not been updated in a long time, so it does not even contain all the packages. We will fix that.
However, this menu works in Mathematica 10.4.1.0 but not in 11.0.0.0. It is unclear to me if Mathematica 11 has a new way of interpreting BrowserCategories.m which we should support or if it is a bug in Mathematica 11.

In the mean time I would suggest that you look for the documentation in the xAct\Documentation\English folder of your installation.

When you are installing xAct, you can also let the main xAct folder be
$UserBaseDirectory \Applications\xAct
which on a windows machine should be something like
C:\Users\....\AppData\Roaming\Mathematica\Applications\xAct

That placement means that you don't have to install xAct every time you upgrade to a new Mathematica version. However, it is a matter of taste where to put it.

Regards
Thomas

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[Bill N]

Hi Thomas,

Thank you very much for the help.  Sounds like a favored method is to go directly to the document files, since they continually get updated from a variety of sources depending on which additional packages are loaded

Thanks also for your helpful suggestion on the xAct file location.  Definitely more convenient not having to reload every Mathematica update.

Regards,

Bill

[magma]

Another possibility:
xPrint - the graphical user interface to xAct - has an Help menu with direct links to all major xAct help files and more.

Please note that I have not tested it yet on version 11, but it should be working ok.
I will appreciate any feedback about it.

Thanks,
Alessandro

[Jay Mancini]

The same problem exists for the Mathematica Program SNEG in that the HELP File Documentation

does not load.....

[Frawm]

Hi,

The same problem still persists in the latest version of xAct (V. 1.1.3): hasn't been a solution found yet?

Thank you,

Regards

[Jose]

Hi,

As Thomas explained earlier in this thread, Mathematica 11 dropped support for the old way of organizing documentation files, and xAct has not been yet updated to the newer ways.

You can access all XXXDoc.nb and XXXRefGuide.nb documentation files by going to the folder xAct/Documentation/English, and for the moment this is the simplest thing to do, in my opinion.

Cheers,

Jose.