The daVinci online documentation is the set of HTML pages you are currently reading. For best results the documentation should be loaded in the Netscape Navigator WWW browser. The search engine of the documentation is written in Java which is available in Navigator 2.0 or higher. Further, the daVinci help system communicates with Netscape to display particular pages of the online documentation when the user requests for help, e.g. by pressing the help button in a dialog window. The help system does not work with other browsers. Refer to Questions & Answers for a PostScript version of the documentation (Warning: information is lost in the Postscript documentation because hyperlinks are not present there!). The HTML hypertext approach has several advantages:

• Documentation is immediately available at any time.
• Clickable hyperlinks can be used for browsing the documentation.
• Easy access to daVinci Internet resources.
• Full integration of the help system.

HTML is a format for hypertexts and can be loaded in a WWW browser. By clicking on one of the blue underlined links or buttons, you can go to another page where more information is provided about the link. Most browsers offer the opportunity to go back and forth according to the followed links and to see the history of previously visited pages. These navigation features are very important to avoid getting lost in the daVinci online documentation. Consult the manual of your browser for details about navigation.

Using the Online Documentation together with daVinci

After you have successfully installed Netscape, daVinci should be able to communicate with the browser by default. This is true if:

1. You are able to start Netscape by typing netscape in your UNIX shell. This means that the Netscape binary must have its default name and can be found in one of the directories specified by your environment variable $PATH.
   Note: If netscape is a shell script at your site, make sure that the script passes the commandline arguments to the Netscape binary (by using $*), otherwise it is not possible to use daVinci's help system.

2. You have set environment variable $DAVINCIHOME to the directory where the daVinci binary is inside (i.e the topmost directory of the daVinci V2.x distribution). Further, this directory must contain the online documentation in the docs directory (this is default).

Technically, daVinci does not start the browser each time as a new process. Instead, Netscape is called with the -remote option. This command looks for an already open browser and gives instruction to load a particular URL. Otherwise, if no Netscape process is currently running, a new browser will be started.

How to get help in daVinci

• You can choose particular topics of the documentation by using the Help menu in daVinci.

• You can start with the overview page and browse through the documentation by clicking on the links.

• You can get the corresponding help page of any dialog window by pressing the help button inside this window.

Roadmap to the Online Documentation

1. General Information:
   Everything a starter needs to know about daVinci: Installation, licence, introduction, and concepts.

2. User Interface
   This chapter explains how to work with daVinci's Motif user interface. The help system refers to these pages, so usually there is no need to read the whole chapter. Instead, read the tutorial and use this chapter as a reference when questions or problems occur.

3. Tutorial
   The tutorial is a guided tour through daVinci V2.1.x to learn about all features.

4. Questions & Answers
   This chapter is a summary of solutions for frequently asked questions.

5. New Features in daVinci V2.1.x
   A list of modifications compared to previous release daVinci V2.0.x.

6. Reference
   Detailed information about particular aspects of daVinci: Term representation (daVinci's graph format), application programmer interface (API), PostScript interface, program options, tools available in the distribution, bibliography.

7. daVinci in the Internet
   Survey about important daVinci resources in the Internet: WWW-server, e-mail address, mailing list, bugreport, etc. Do not miss to read it!

Click it to open the folder. This shows the content of the corresponding chapter.

Click it to close an opened folder.

Click it to open all folders in one step. Another click on this icon undos this operation by closing all folders.