>"Well, I'm not convinced about it, but here is some info about the
>implementation of the help system to get you started."
>
>"As for regex searches on item content, I guess it is necessary
>to walk through the lookup table, load the text blobs, and
>do searches on them"
>
>Hope this helps, & good luck."
Thanks for this information. It is easy to get a text file with the titles and the body of the topic. I did it this
way in command line Maxima.
writefile("c:/help.txt");
describe("", inexact);
when prompted
I answer
all;
then I close Maxima.
That pretty much gets everything. Is there anything missed by this way? I don't know but I find help.txt to be easily
searchable in Notepad++ which I have. This is something you only have to do once, then once you have the file you can
write code to search it. I can test regular expressions code with Notepad++ regexp search feature (although I am not
sure if the syntax for Notepad++ regular expressions is usable in Maxima) . I have determined that Maxima can read in a
file this big in a second or so. My thoughts are that I don't think it should be this hard, I want the average user who
is not an expert in Maxima to be able to do this. Also not everyone has Notepad++. Also maybe regular expressions are
too hard for many. I think AND, OR, NOT, Parentheses and NEAR would be of great use to many. Regular expression would
be an optional syntax for sophisticated users. I might add some tips and examples of regular expression searches.
Rich