I have a fairly sizable Paclet built and generated in the latest (albeit outdated) Eclipse/Workbench. Everything is generating acceptably in Mathematica 12.1 (Other posts have warned me not to upgrade to 12.2, but that’s for another day).
The problem is that when I hover over my functions (symbols) in a notebook, I get the hover buttons and the left one (double chevron) brings up the tool-tops nicely from my package symbol::usage statements. The right one (info circle), however, does not bring up my symbol reference page for that function; in fact, it is grayed out and can’t be selected.
Any idea why this is happening? Am I missing some switch that would link the right symbol hover button to the respective documentation page? Is this a known issue?
There doesn’t seem to be an answer to this, however, I’ve discovered a way to get to the symbol reference page in the custom documentation in version 12.x.
The hover button simply doesn’t work and there doesn’t seem to be an answer available on the web.
Using ?<SymbolName> brings up an auto-complete drop-down, which also has the info button on it for built-in functions, but not for custom functions built with Workbench. For example, the built-in Set function has an info button, but my custom SetMixture function does not (even though Mathematica knows that it exists and the package that it is in).
However, if you go ahead and click on the auto-complete item for the custom function, it will bring up the “Usage” statement from the custom package. In the top right-hand-corner of that usage statement window is an information icon that actually links directly to the symbol reference page in the documentation.
It’s a bit of a round-about way to get there, but it saves from having to go to the DC and search for it. This also means that the documentation index is actually working.
I’d really, REALLY, like to have this work like the built-in functions, though.
That is a really good idea. I also wish there was a public bug tracker. I think the public Jetbrains YouTrack is a great example implementation of this from another software company.
Well, the info button shows up, but it doesn’t go directly to the function listing. It does a search on the name of the function in the Doc Center. It comes up with lots of stuff and, depending on the name, the actual function I’m looking for is not even on the first page of search results.
Building the documentation and paclet with Mathematica’s “PacletTools” and “DocumentationTools” seems to have fixed this problem. As long as the documentation is built, installed, and indexed fully into the Wolfram Documentation Center, the hover button and F1 Help are all working an behaving identically to the built-in Wolfram help functions and documentation.
