You may have noticed that the Inventor API help has had some issues over the past several releases. We were using a commercial product for creating the help that didn’t work very well with the type of API that Inventor has. It forced us to do things in certain ways that weren’t really what we wanted and made it difficult to add some of the features that we wanted.
Inventor 2013 introduces an entirely new help system. Both the system that generates the help and the result is quite different from what we had before. I hope you see it as an improvement but would like very much to hear your suggestions on what will make it better. We are using a new help generation system and no longer have the same limitations. The new help is shown below.
The transition from the old to the new help doesn’t come without some hiccups. The old help system used a proprietary database and the translator that converted it into the new help wasn’t 100% accurate. We’ve identified and fixed many of the issues but I’m sure there are still a lot more out there. With over 21,500 help topics it’s difficult to check every one. At the bottom of every topic you’ll see the link shown below and as you notice any problems or have any suggestions on improving the help please feel free to use it.
One feature that was in the previous help and is missing in the new help is the index. It’s missing because we ran out of time before the release was due. Plan on seeing the index return in the future. Even though the index is missing, the search capability does work and will find things the index won’t. There were a few other things that we ran out of time on too, so there are plans for future improvements but I would like to hear your ideas too.
I think one big improvement over the previous help is how the code samples are presented. Any topic that’s demonstrated in any of the samples now has a Samples section in the topic that lists the samples along with links to each one.
The samples are no longer included in the contents of the various object, method, or property topics but are topics by themselves. This allows them to be categorized and supports the linking as shown above. I think the current categorization needs some work so please let me know if you have any suggestions. The new help system also now supports samples in multiple languages and it’s easy for us to find out which topics don’t have samples so we can concentrate on adding samples to demonstrate more functionality.
-Brian
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