我想从Matlab帮助团队本周欢迎来宾博客克里斯·科利特（Chris Kollett）谈论重新设计的帮助浏览器。

If you’re a regular user of the Help browser, you’ll notice that its user interface has changed quite a bit in R2009b. One of our main motivations for these changes was to make the Help browser useful in layouts other than its default layout. Time and time again we’ve seen users struggle to use the Editor and Help browser at the same time, because they both work best when they’re laid out relatively wide. Since users can’t get them both on screen at the same time, they end up switching back and forth between them, wasting time and breaking their flow.

If you struggle to see your work and use the Help system at the same time, here are a couple of tips for making the Help browser take up less space in R2009b:

Close the Help navigator

是的，实际上，关闭帮助导航器（帮助浏览器的左侧，目录和搜索结果显示）。过去，如果您关闭了帮助导航器，您将根本无法浏览文档 - 目录，演示甚至搜索字段都会消失。In R2009b, we’ve moved the search field up into the toolbar when the Help navigator is closed, and even more significantly, we’ve replaced the old location dropdown with a breadcrumb navigation widget that lets you access to the full table of contents and all of the demos from the toolbar. If you’ve always wanted the Help browser to give more space to the documentation without sacrificing so much functionality, R2009b should be a big improvement for you.

Consider a taller, narrower Help browser

Prior to R2009b, it was virtually impossible to use the Help browser once you made it narrow. The Help navigator could only be positioned on the left hand side of the Help browser, and as we discussed above, you lost a ton of functionality if you tried to close it. So if you made the Help browser narrow, you had very little room left to display the documentation. In R2009b, we’ve introduced an alternate layout for the Help browser: if you resize the Help browser so that it’s tall and narrow, the Help navigator moves up above the contents. We’re hoping you’ll find it convenient to try some alternate layouts, like docking the Help browser in a narrow space next to the editor.

Please try out these changes and let us know if they help keep you in your flow – we don’t want you to get bogged down in the Help browser and lose track of your work. We’ll look at some other changes to the Help browser in a later entry.