[Pythonmac-SIG] How does the XCode documentation index work?

[Nicholas Riley]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 11:44:14PM +0100, Jack Jansen wrote:
> Does anyone know whether I can access the index that XCode uses to 
> search the Apple Developer documentation?
> 
> The IDE has a function "Lookup in Apple Developer Documentation", and 
> that worked reasonable under 10.2, but under 10.3 it doesn't work: it 
> usually returns the "nothing found" page. And if I type in API call 
> names in Help Viewer directly I also get no hits.
> 
> But XCode apparently uses a different index, it can find API calls 
> pretty well. Unfortunately I can't seem to find the right OSA 
> invocations to make XCode display help for me.

>From the Xcode release notes:

  * The developer documentation released with Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) had a
    problem that prevented full-text searches of the Tools group in the
    documentation window from finding anything outside of the release notes.
    Thus, search results from the Xcode, gcc, make, and related tools
    documentation were never returned. To enable searching of the primary tools
    documentation, run this command in a Terminal window:

        sudo ln -s /Developer/Documentation/DeveloperTools/DeveloperTools\ idx
        /Developer/Documentation/DeveloperTools/Tools\ idx

    In subsequent releases of the developer documentation, this problem has
    been solved. (If /Developer/Documentation/DeveloperTools/Tools idx exists
    on your system, there's no need to run the command above.)

I have found the documentation window in Xcode very useful and have
largely switched to using it instead of Safari/LaunchBar for
documentation lookups.

It also refers to using /Developer/Tools/pbhelpindexer, which is a
very long and involved zsh script with lots of special cases.  Good
luck...

-- 
=Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>