One thing that I have to do regularly is send people a link to a particular page of IDL’s documentation. The problem is that I normally browse the local documentation from the ? command a the IDL prompt which opens a local webpage in my browser, but is not accessible to someone else on their machine (the path is different depending on platform, version, etc.). What I needed was a way to translate local help URLs to URLs pointing at the online help at exelisvis.com.

Here is a bookmarklet that does the translation:

javascript:(function(){name=location.href.substring(location.href.lastIndexOf('/')+1);name=name.substring(0,name.indexOf('.'));location.href='http://exelisvis.com/docs/'+name+'.html';})();

Just drag it to your bookmarks bar and click it when on a local IDL help page and it should navigate to the corresponding exelisvis.com documentation page. It doesn’t do any error checking right now and it doesn’t work for some of the pages that are not the syntax for a particular routine, but it has been very useful for me in the past few days.