Panorama Help Wizard
The Panorama Help wizard is your guide to Panorama. To open this wizard, choose Panorama X Help from the Help menu.

### Choosing a Help Realm

Panorama’s Help wizard contains thousands of topics. To keep all those topics from being overwhelming, the wizard provides a couple dozen “realms” that contain topics that are commonly used together. The first time you open the wizard, it shows you the Basics realm, with the most common topics you’ll need to learn about when you start using Panorama.

To pick a different realm, click on the magnifying glass or the name of the realm, then choose from the pop-up menu.

If you want to search from all available topics, choose ALL at the top of the menu.

When you close and then re-open the Help wizard, it remembers what realm you were using.

### Searching for a Specific Topic

To locate a particular topic, click in the search box in the upper left hand corner and start typing. The topic list will show the list of topic names that match. Click the topic you want to see.

If you click the Full Text Search checkbox, the wizard will search the contents of each help topic, not just the name. For example, you could find every topic that mentions the word menu (this will display quite a long list of topics!).

### Using the Breadcrumb Navigation Links

The “breadcrumb” appears at the top of every help page. This includes a link to previously viewed topics (equivalent to the Back button in a web browser), and links to the “parents” of the current page. If you’re viewing a page and you want to back out to a higher level topic (i.e. look at the forest instead of an individual tree), simply click the appropriate breadcrumb link.

### Opening Multiple Help Windows

To open a second Panorama Help window, click on the green arrow (or choose New Help Window from the Window menu).

You can open as many help windows as you like, with each window showing a different help topic.

#### Opening a Link in a New Window

To open a link in a new help window, right click on the link and choose Open Link in New Window from the pop-up menu.

You can also open the link in the standard web browser (usually Safari), or copy the link to the clipboard.

### Transferring Help Information to your Project

If you are editing a program or a formula, you may want to transfer information from a help topic into your work. There are several ways to do this. A very simple technique is to simply click on the help contents and select the text you want, then copy or drag the text wherever you want it.

To drag the function or statement name and its parameters, click on the gray arrow in the upper left and drag to wherever you want (you can actually start the drag from anywhere in the box, not just the arrow).

You can also right click on this box for a pop-up menu that includes options for copying the topic (the function/statement and parameters) to the clipboard, or to open this topic in your default web browser (usually Safari).

### Advanced: Submitting Corrections

Let us apologize in advance, you may find errors in Panorama X’s voluminous documentation. In the past, a number of Panorama users have been kind enough to report mistakes to us, so with Panorama X we’ve actually provided a way that you can make the correction yourself and submit it to ProVUE for publication. In most cases, making the correction will actually be simpler than reporting a mistake was in the past!

#### Markdown

The Panorama X documentation is written using a formatting system called Markdown. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, which is then automatically converted to HTML. Markdown is much simpler than HTML, and has become very popular in recent years (it was originally invented by John Gruber in 2004).

There are many resources for learning Markdown. The basics are very simple, and can be learned in a few moments. Since there is a wealth of online resources for learning Markdown, we won’t attempt to teach it here. However, if you look in the Corrections menu you’ll see links to some of these online resources.

You’ll probably want to preview any changes you make. To do that you’ll need to install Markdown on your system. Panorama X actually uses a slightly enhanced version of Markdown called MultiMarkdown. MultiMarkdown is free and very easy to install. Just choose Download MultiMarkdown from the Corrections menu and follow the instructions on the web page that appears. It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.

#### The Corrections Window

The Corrections window allows you to edit the raw source of a documentation page:

If you are simply fixing a typo, just find the typo and make the change. If you installed MultiMarkdown, you can switch back and forth between the raw source and the formatted page using the Edit/Preview buttons at the top.

Use the Notes section at the bottom of the window if you want to submit any comments to ProVUE along with your changes. When the changes are complete, press the Send to ProVUE button in the upper right hand corner. This sends the correction directly to ProVUE without any further confirmation. You can then close the Corrections window. (Note: The changes you have made do not modify your copy of Panorama, and will not show up in the regular Help window, even on your computer, until they are approved by ProVUE.

#### Page Sections

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the documentation is divided into sections: PageHeader, Filename, Descriptions, Parameters, Body, etc. Each section is surrounded by a pair of tags.

You should never edit the tags surrounding the sections. In addition, you should never edit the contents of the Page, Filename, or PageType tags.

To help you keep track of what you’ve done, the top of the window shows you which sections you have modified.

If this area is blank, you haven’t made any changes!

##### Cross Reference Links

In Markdown, a link to an HTML page is written like this:

    [Title][http://www.somesite.com/somepage.html]

To link to another page in Panorama X’s Help system, the title should be the name of that page, and the URL should be left blank. For example, this is how to make a link to the arrayfilter( page:

    [arrayfilter(][]

Panorama will automatically expand [] into the correct link for the page.

##### Tags and SeeAlso

The Tags section contains a comma separated list of tags for this page. These tags can be used for searching, and they can also be used in the SeeAlso section. If the SeeAlso section contains @tag, all of the pages with that tag will be listed in the see also section. You can also simply include a comma separated list of pages in this section, or you can combine tags and pages like this:

    @math,or,and

##### Embedding HTML Tags

It’s rarely necessary, but you can embed HTML tags into the middle of the Markdown content. For example, some pages contain HTML tags for creating tables.

History

Version | Status | Notes
10.0 | New | New in this version.