Pressing the "Help" key (or using the shortcut ?) when some text is selected in the active window will open a help window when help is available about the selected word(s), and will beep once if no help is available.
Alternately, you can select the word(s) and then do a control-click in the selection. The selection may be a topic, or a term of the Smile dictionary.
Getting some help - The "Help" key
The Smile help system uses unique blue-underlined names (such as About Smile help) to provide links to associated help files stored in the "Help files" folder of Smile.
Smile provides the following options for opening its help files.
• Select and depress "Help" key. To open any help file, use click and drag to select the entire blue-underlined filename, and then depress the "Help" key (or use shortcut ?)
• Click-click and depress "Help" key. For filenames of a single word (such as Help), double-click to select the word, then depress the "Help" key to open the help file. Try it now.
• Click-click-drag with Control key depressed - This is another way to open a help file. The Help key is not used. With the Control key depressed, simply double-click on the first (or last) word of the help filename, and drag to select the entire filename. Smile will automatically open the help file. Try opening Scripts in text windows using this method.
• Pressing the "Help" key with no text selected will open the Help contents window, from which you can then open any desired help file.
• Pressing the "Help" key while some term of Smile's dictionary (verbs, classes) is selected will open Smile's dictionary and put this term in view.
• Pressing the "Help" key without a proper help filename selected will cause a beep. For example, try selecting only "Scripts" in Scripts in text windows and then depress the "Help" key. Or try double-clicking (no dragging) on the word "Scripts" of the filename with the Control key depressed. A beep should be heard in both cases.
(Note : Command ()-click still works to open URL's if your computer has this function. There is no interference between this mechanism and Smile's help system.)
Alphabetical list of the help windows
Help contents lists help files of the Smile help system.
Alphabetical list of the topics
See Index for help about a particular topic.
Thematic help
• A special section is devoted to Very beginners who are curious to learn about AppleScript and Smile.
• For general information about Smile - such as requirements and the installation instructions - see the Read Me file.
• Users familiar with Apple's Script Editor may be interested in learning about Smile as related to Script Editor. See Smile and Script Editor.
• For scripting help, see Writing scripts.
• For a quick start on debugging, see the examples provided in Debugging a script.
• Text windows are a master feature of Smile : use text windows to run scripts line-by-line to greatly facilitate debugging. To get started with the text windows as a debugging tool, read Scripts in text windows.
• To get help on the main windows of Smile, see Text window and the Script window.
• Smile provides some convenient functionalities which are not part of basic AppleScript : coercions, math functions, functions on lists, script handling, etc. See More AppleScript functions for information on how to use these functions.
• In some circumstances users can be interested in using Smile as their scriptable text editor. To get started, see the Text suite section of the Smile dictionary help file.
• Experts and developers may want to customize the interface of Smile. See Custom interfaces for a description of the various possibilities.
Sample scripts
Some help files contain sample scripts. You can copy or drag them to a script window, then click the "Run" button. You can also run them directly from the text window. If you are not familiar with running scripts from text windows, see Scripts in text windows.
Technical support
Technical support is available by various means, see Technical support.
Advanced users
Some help files include information intended for advanced users. Such information is at the end of the window, and is announced by the green, bold, mention : Advanced.
The sample scripts sometimes end with a colon (:). This symbol prevents a script which runs from a text window from outputing its result to screen (see Output windows). In this case, make sure you select the colon together with the script before executing.
