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documentation strings and records
| Date: Tue, 24 March 92, 13:23 -0700
| From: s9274@srl1.LANL.GOV
|
| Eyvind Ness writes:
|
| What I want is a programmatic interface to the CP command "Show
| Documentation".
|
| As you know from the responses so far, the DOCUMENTATION function
| retrieves a documentation string and the "Show Documentation" command
| displays a record from the documentation database. (Another command,
| "Show Definition Documentation", retrieves a documentation string OR
| directs you to the online documentation.)
|
| In regards to a programmatic interface to "Show Documentation", if you
| wanted to display the documentation for the DOCUMENTATION function, you
| could use
|
| (sage::lookup-manual-internal
| (sage:find-record-group-for-topic-and-type 'documentation 'function))
|
| If you wanted to print the documentation, you could provide a printer
| object as the second argument to SAGE::LOOKUP-MANUAL-INTERNAL.
|
| Note that Lisp objects can be provided as symbols, whereas other topics
| must be provided in quotation marks, e.g.,
|
| (sage::lookup-manual-internal
| (sage:find-record-group-for-topic-and-type
| "How documentation is stored" "section"))
|
| John Krieger (s9274@srl1.lanl.gov)
| Westinghouse Savannah River Company
Great, thanks, John - that's very close to what I wanted.
However, LOOKUP-MANUAL-INTERNAL expects to do its output to a Screen
object, and it seems to be difficult to trap this output and filter out
the pure ASCII documentation string.
For instance, if you give it a NIL arg instead of a Screen object:
(sage::lookup-manual-internal
(sage:find-record-group-for-topic-and-type
"How documentation is stored" "section")
nil)
it pops up a menu offering either the main screen or some of your local
printers.
I guess that what I would have to do (if I had lots of extra time and
patience) is to redirect the drawing operations from
LOOKUP-MANUAL-INTERNAL to a temporary bitmap stream and then try to
dissect from it the ASCII doc string.
But as long as I can get most of the on-line CL docstrings from my TI
Explorer without any complications, I think I'll settle for that (sorry
SLUG-friends: for some problem areas the Explorer is a lot easier to
work with ;-)
Eyvind.