Ken & Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

July 28th, 2008

Quan recently commented that he uses the “see also” part of M-file help as a way of finding related functions.

This made me think back to my early days writing MATLAB code, where my TA would take off points for not including help comments at the top of every M-file. Including a See Also is a nice way to build a graph of related functions, and it helps your users understand the relationship between files. I use it most when trying to find an exact function in a related family of functions, usually from one of the string or matrix manipulation functions.

We started out just by adding the See Also for related functions in the M-file help, as you can see in the following MATLAB 5.0 help for findstr.

By the time we got to MATLAB R2008a, the findstr doc was expanded a bit, and the functions in the see also were hyperlinks to their respective functions.

When you write your own M-files, you too can get the hyperlinks for free. Just add a %see also function1, function2, etc… line to the help section of your script or function, and MATLAB takes care of the rest.

We also provide a Help Report that scans the M-files in a directory and will let you know if you missed any “see also” lines in your M-files.

By Michael Katz

Mike is a developer on the MATLAB Desktop team. When not describing himself in the third person, biking, homebrewing, or rooting for the home team, he's busy trying to make the world a better place for programming.

08:05 UTC | Posted in Command Window, Help Browser | Permalink |

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6 Responses to “Seeing also”

1. Harsha replied on July 28th, 2008 at 09:54 UTC :
   

   I would like to know how you got this kind of border for screenshots?

2. Mike replied on July 28th, 2008 at 10:26 UTC :
   

   Harsha,

   On Windows, I use SnagIt to do the screen caps and annotations.

   Unfortunately its do not look so nice, so for that I use Adobe Fireworks. I do a torn edge and then a drop shadow.

3. Quan replied on August 5th, 2008 at 00:16 UTC :
   

   That’s a cool feature for the see also command. I just got the chance to check my google reader today, and I always check out the MATLAB blogs first. Some great stuff you guys are presenting these days!

4. Mike replied on August 5th, 2008 at 13:19 UTC :
   

   Thanks Quan!

5. Ed Ross replied on September 18th, 2008 at 12:08 UTC :
   

   The hyperlinks are a great feature of the help documentation that have helped me quickly find a particular function. When writing help documentation, however, it sometimes would be useful to embed hyperlinks anywhere within the text instead of only in the “See also” section. Is this possible?

6. Mike replied on September 18th, 2008 at 12:42 UTC :
   

   Ed,

   Yes. Take a look at this example:

   function help
   %This is the help for the file. For more information check out <a
   %href="matlab:web('http://blogs.mathworks.com/desktop/2008/07/28/seeing-also')">the blog</a>.
   %
   %see also help
   

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<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.