What’s Up, Doc?

Today’s guest blogger is Leslie McBrayer, who is in the Documentation group at MathWorks. Her team's goal is to make it easier for you to learn how to use our products. She is writing today about some features of the R2015b documentation: a few that are new, and a few that have been around for some time.

Contents

Function and Block Pages

If you're like most folks who use our documentation, you have probably viewed reference pages that provide detailed information about how to use specific functions or blocks. To get a sense of what has changed for R2015b, let's look at the page for a brand new function, rad2deg.

doc rad2deg

In general, the pages look very much as they did before, though we've made some cosmetic improvements to some elements, like the search bar. In previous releases, the search bar was lurking near the top, but was in the middle of the page, close to similar-looking elements. Now, we hope you don't have to think about where to find it.

Although this isn't one of our longer pages, it undoubtedly scrolls off the bottom of your browser window. However, you can use the new "On This Page" links on the left to quickly navigate to sections of the page, like "Examples" or "Input Arguments."

Ideally, the examples on the page help you see how our functionality works. Did you know that you can run example code directly from the installed Help browser, without copying and pasting into the Command Window? Select the code to run, right-click, and select Evaluate Section. (This is one of those features that's been around a while, but that not everyone has discovered.)

Many functions and blocks, especially those recently introduced, indicate at the bottom of their page when they made their debut. If you scroll to the bottom of this page, you can verify that rad2deg is, in fact, new for R2015b.

Archived Versions

By default, the documentation that you see in the Help browser is installed on your machine along with the software. Naturally, the installed content is specific to your release.

We realize, though, that sometimes it's helpful to see documentation for another release. We archive previous releases of the documentation on our Web site, so you can access it there (assuming you have a MathWorks Account and license). The help landing page is at www.mathworks.com/help.

From the landing page, you can select "Other Releases" from the list on the left side of the page. Then, you can choose the release from the list.

Online Content

Of course, the online documentation isn't just for archived versions: it is also where we maintain the most up-to-date content for our products. You can view this content in MATLAB by setting a Help preference. Specifically, on the Home tab, in the Environment section, click Preferences. Select MATLAB > Help, and then set the Documentation Location.

Font Size

If the text seems too large or small, you can quickly zoom into the page using Ctrl + Mouse Scroll. This setting is remembered across sessions, and applies to all subsequent Help browser tabs--which, by the way, you can now manage using standard keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl + T to open a new tab.

Product Information

For details about these and other new features, check out the MATLAB Release Notes. As of R2015b, you can quickly navigate to Release Notes and to other product-level information, like Getting Started, from any page in the documentation. Click the information icon (the "i") next to the product name on the left side of the page.

Your Feedback Welcomed

Reading about documentation is a very "meta" activity; thanks for your kind attention. If you have any general feedback on the overall documentation, we welcome it here.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2015b