A.11.4 Help Window

Help Window

The help window is a browser for displaying help information on TOPCAT; it can be obtained by clicking the Help () button that appears in the toolbar of most windows. It views the text contained in this document, so it may be what you are looking at now.

The panel on the right hand side displays the currently selected section of help text itself. The panel on the left gives a couple of ways of selecting this view:

Text Search

Allows you to search for words in the manual. Enter a word or words as search terms, and a list of sections which fully or partially match your search terms will be displayed. You can click on one of these to take you to the section that has been found.

Table of Contents

A hierarchical view of the available help topics. This is the table of contents of the manual; clicking on an entry will take you to the relevant section.

The bar in between the two panels can be dragged with the mouse to affect the relative sizes of these windows.

The toolbar contains these extra buttons:

Back

Moves backward through the list of topics in the order you have looked at them.

Forward

Moves forward through the list of topics in the order you have looked at them.

Print

Pops up a dialogue to permit printing of the current page to a file or printer (but see below).

Page Setup

Pops up a dialogue to do printer setup.

To Browser

Displays the currently displayed help page in your normal WWW browser.

Although the printing buttons work, if you want to print out the whole of this document rather than just a few sections you may be better off printing the PDF version, or printing the single-page HTML version through a web browser. The most recent version of these should be available on the web at http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/sun253.html and http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253.pdf; you can also find the HTML version in the topcat jar file at uk/ac/starlink/topcat/help/sun253.html or, if you have a full TOPCAT installation, in docs/topcat/sun253/sun253.html and docs/topcat/sun253.pdf (the single-page HTML version is available here in the HTML version).

The help browser is an HTML browser and some of the hyperlinks in the help document point to locations outside of the help document itself. Selecting these links will go to the external documents. When the viewer is displaying an external document, its URL will be displayed in a line at the bottom of the window. You can cut and paste from this using your platform's usual mechanisms for this.