If you are running from an X-Windows display, you can obtain online help by typing ? at the WAVE> prompt. This brings up a window, somewhat like a web browser, that includes much of the info from the WAVE manuals, allowing you to search for particular topics, etc. It's pretty self-explanatory. If you are running WAVE from a terminal without X-Windows support, you can type txthelp at the WAVE> prompt for an ASCII version.
If you need to do something and want to know if there is a program already written that can do the trick, try the following:
(see above)
Chapter 1 of the PV-WAVE Reference Manual contains a listing of all bult-in programs and functions, arranged into functional groups. Check it out.
There are index files, sorted alphabetically or by category for our major user-written libraries. Each line of an index file contains a program's name, type (F for function, P for porgram, or M for MAIN), and a short description of its functionality. The alpabetical index for a given library (directory) is called alph.one and the sorted file is called cat.one. (HTML versions are cat.html and alph.html and can be reached from the main WAVE page.)
liner is a shell script that searches the alph.one indexes (see above) for keywords and prints out program names which may help. For example, if you wanted to know what WAVE programs can be used to load images from disk, and you have already checked the built-in programs, you could type liner load at a shell prompt, (not the WAVE> prompt!) and you might see:
/users/wavelib/idlusr --------------
clt:p load a color table. menu selection.
makevlt:p generate and load a random color table (ct).
/users/wavelib/idlusr2 --------------
/users/wavelib --------------
load:f loads a bitmapped image from a file
load_512:p load a 512x512 16-bit bitmapped image from disk
load_bin:p load a 256x256 16-bit bitmapped image from disk
load_images:p read in images (acquired by take_images) and do simple processing
This tells you that load, load_512, load_bin and load_images (in the /users/wavelib directory) are what you are looking for, and you could then examine them to see how to use them (see next section)
This usenet newsgroup is a good place to ask questions and find out if other WAVE/IDL users have written programs to do what you want to do.
OK, you know what program you want to use, but how do you use it? Possible ways to find out:
See above
The printed manuals give detailed instructions for using built-in procedures and functions and standard library programs.
doc_library is a PV-WAVE program that extracts header documentation for user-written programs. See page 2-204 of PV-WAVE Reference Manual. User-written programs should contain documentation in a header, see /users/wavelib/template for the usual template used to describe program use.
Many user-written programs take a HELP keyword (see Basics ) which prints documentation. Thus typing load_bin,/help at a WAVE> prompt gives usage information. Programmers are stongly suggested to include this. Also, many programs which require arguments will print usage information if called without args.
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