The Navigation Pane
The Navigation Pane contains four navigational tabs:
the Contents, Index, Search and Favorites tabs. These
all provide different methods to access a topic in the
help file.
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The contents tab reveals a tree like table of contents,
where you can navigate to the desired topic by opening
and closing parts of the tree. You can even access the
deepest sections using this TOC. If you right click on
an item here and choose "Print...", you'll have the option
to print the selected topic or the selected topic and
all subtopics. However printing is not the initial goal
of this representation of the manual (the PDF version is
suitable for printing).
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The index tab lists a huge number of "keywords" (actually
manual page titles). You can pick one, or start to type
a keyword, see the list adjusting to your input, and then
click on a topic, or press enter if the selected topic
is the one you would like to see.
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The search tab shows one of the most powerful features of
the HTML Help Viewer, the full text search (also known as
FTS). Here you can type in your search expression,
optionally connecting words with AND/OR/NEAR/NOT. Before
you click 'List topics', you can also set some options
at the bottom. After the search results are displayed,
you'll realize that manual text and user note results are
separated. To sort out the two types, click on the
'Location' column header. Now from the search results list,
you can pick a topic, and see it's page. The keywords you
searched for are highlighted on the page.
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The favorites tab enables you to store your most used
topics in a list, easily accessible. Here you can see
the list, add the current topic to it, remove one, or
display a selected item. You can also specify your own
title for the favorite, by typing it into the 'Current
topic:' box. The user note page titles are prepended
with a 'N:' string so you can distinguish them from
normal manual pages in the favorites listing.