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The On-Line Help System

 

SLIME uses Netscape or Mosaic to display on-line help. The help text is taken from a hypertext version of this manual. All SLIME installations are capable of using Netscape but, since SLIME needs to be linked against a special library from NCSA that is not included in the SLIME distribution (for copyright reasons) and that is not as portable as it should be, your version of SLIME may not support Mosaic.

I recommend that you use Netscape in any case.

You may change your help viewer using the Help Configuration command from the Options menu belonging to the model-editing tool. You may also change the location from which the help-text will be read. Help text may be held in local disk files or on a remote http server.

Each SLIME tool has a Help menu with a number of commands.

Context-Sensitive Help
This command initiates one of the two context-sensitive help systems available in SLIME. The cursor will change to a question pointer. Click on the component on which you want help. The cursor will then revert to its normal shape. You can abort this operation by clicking outside any of the SLIME windows. You can also invoke this command by pressing the tex2html_wrap_inline1861 key while holding down the tex2html_wrap_inline1837 key. This command will sometimes provide more specific help than the alternative method for obtaining context-sensitive help described below.

Overview
This command requests general information about the application window from which you invoked it. For example if you issue this command using the Help menu in a baseline tool, you will get information about baseline tools.

Index
This command requests an index for all of the help information available for SLIME. It will actually cause the table of contents to be displayed rather than a full index.

Keyboard This command requests help on special keys used by SLIME.

Tutorial
This command requests a hypertext version of the tutorial given in Chapter 2.

Using Help
This command requests help on using help (this chapter).

Product Information
This command is used to display the version number and copyright information for the version of SLIME that you are using. This information will be displayed in an information dialogue rather than the hypertext viewer.

You may also obtain context-sensitive help by clicking on the Help button in a dialogue or by pressing the tex2html_wrap_inline1861 key. If you press the tex2html_wrap_inline1861 key over a user-interface component that does not respond to the keyboard you will get help for the first component that contains the one for which you requested help and that responds to keyboard events. The much clumsier method for obtaining context sensitive help from the menu does not have this problem but you may still find it less complicated to press the tex2html_wrap_inline1861 key and use the hypertext links to navigate to the help page that you want.


next up previous contents
Next: Special Keys Up: Reference Section Previous: Application Resources

Chris Flatters
Thu Mar 14 16:02:50 MST 1996