The HTML documentation help system is supported by the following browsers:
The search system of the HTML documentation is implemented in JavaScript, which runs in your browser. The search system is not a full text search; certain common words are not indexed and will be ignored when entered as search terms, even during a phrase search.
The following options are available as check boxes and radio buttons to control how the search terms are interpreted.
| Search Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Search method | Defines whether to find topics containing any of the keywords ("or"), all of the keywords ("and"), or whether the keywords occur in sequential order ("phrase"). |
| Match case | When this option is selected, the search results only list words that match the case of the words in the search. |
| Highlight | When this option is selected, all instances of the keywords are highlighted in the result pages. |
| Find whole words only | Normally, the search will return results if any part of a word matches a search term. When this option is selected, partial word matches are not considered. |
Matches are ranked according to the total number of occurrences of all matched keywords and are listed from the highest rank to the lowest. Matches in headers and titles give results higher ranking than matches in paragraphs.
The search system filters common words, for example "a", "an", and "the". If you use such a stop word, a message appears just above the search results listing the filtered stop words. Stop words are filtered from all types of searches including "phrase" searches.
The search system uses a stemming algorithm to assure that verb tenses and plural forms will result in the same output. For example, "render" and "renders" are treated the same. Similarly, "evaluation" and "evaluate" produce the same output.
The search system supports both single character wildcards (by using the "?" character), and variable character length wildcards (using the "*" character). For example, searching for "p?int" will match the words "paint" and "point". Searching for "t*on" matches words such as "tension", "cartoon", and "tetrahedron".
When you first open the search panel, there may be a pause of a few seconds while your browser loads the search database for the first time. Opening the search panel subsequently during the same browser session is much faster because the search database stays cached in memory.
If the help responsiveness degrades over the period of a browser session, this can be due to browser memory consumption. In this case, you should close and re-open the help. Opening multiple instances of the help system in different browser windows may degrade your overall system performance because of memory consumption of the browser.
This search system does not always successfully highlight matches. This may occur during a phrase search when stop words are filtered, or when a word root is matched.