Chapter 9 Getting Help

This chapter describes how to obtain information about Prism and other Sun products available at your site.

See the following sections:

• " Prism's Online Help Systems"

• " Obtaining Online Documentation"

Prism's Online Help Systems

There are several ways in which you can get help in Prism:

• The Help menu in the menu bar provides help on several major topics. It includes the Help Index, which gives in-depth information about all aspects of Prism. See " Choosing Selections From the Help Menu".

• The Help selection in menus and the Help button in windows and dialog boxes provide instructions for using these screen areas. Pressing the F1 key in a window or dialog box also displays a help screen.

• Command-line help provides information about commands you can issue from the command window.

Using the Browser-based Help System

Prism displays its help files via your World Wide Web browser. The default browser is Netscape(TM), although your system administrator can change this. To specify which browser you want to use for graphical Prism, set the Prism resource Prism.helpBrowser to the executable name of the browser; see " Specifying the Browser to Use for Displaying Help".

If you don't have a browser running, Prism starts one. If you have a browser currently running as you use Prism, by default Prism displays the help information in that browser. You can change this behavior via the Prism.helpUseExisting resource; once again, see " Specifying the Browser to Use for Displaying Help".

See " Setting Up Your Environment" for important information about setting up your environment for Prism's use of your default browser to display Prism's online help files.

Choosing Selections From the Help Menu

The Help menu provides information in a variety of ways:

• Choose Using Help to display an overview of the Help system.

• Choose Overview to display an overview of the features of Prism.

• Choose Glossary to display a list of terms used in Prism. You can click on a term to find out more about it.

• Choose Commands Reference to display a list of Prism commands. You can click on a command's link marker to obtain its reference description.

• Choose Tutorial to display a tutorial that will teach you the basics of Prism.

Getting Help on Using the Mouse

Some Prism windows include an icon of a mouse,

Click on this icon to display information about using the mouse in the window.

Obtaining Help From the Command Window

Use the help command to obtain help from the command window. Issuing the command

help commands

displays a list of Prism commands and editing key combinations. Issuing help with the name of a command as an argument displays help on that command. Issuing help with no arguments displays a brief message about how to use command-line help.

Obtaining Online Documentation

Prism documentation is available both in print and Sun AnswerBook forms. Prism also comes with a Solaris-style manual page.

Viewing Manual Pages

To obtain a manual page, choose the Man Pages selection from the Doc menu. This brings up xman, a standard X program for viewing manual pages; xman operates independently of Prism.

Help for xman appears in the xman window, as shown in Figure 9-1. You can use xman to view any Solaris manual pages available on your Sun system.

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Note -

If xman is not available on your system, you will not be able to use this feature.

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Figure 9-1 xman Window