The Houdini help browser is locking up houdini on xp sp3, the online help does not work when faced with searching for a term. So until this is all fixed

Is there any way I can configure an old version of the help to work in a web browser without having houdini running ? As soon as I close houdini this http://localhost:48626/ [localhost] will not work.

Of note:- I have just discovered if you have firefox closed and open the help, you still get the errors but if you just close them the help shows up. Just don't open firefox !

R

I've been having the same problem.

In Vista 64

When I open Houdini the first time the help browser is verrrrrrry sloooow to open and Houdini is immobilized until the browser has loaded.

I can completely corrupt the browser load by clicking Houdini on the tool bar before the browser load is complete.

This will in turn cause Houdini to stall.

Once I have this misbehavior the only reliable way to get Houdini to open again is after a full system restart.

I have tried
1. Closing firefox as others have suggested = no change
2. Disabling Clam Win Antivirus = no change
3. Killing off explorer with the task manager and then re-running this from the applications/new task button in the task manager. = sometimes this works.

Is it possible to set the preferences so that the help browser does not load on start up? I seem to recall seeing this somewhere, but I have browsed the 123.cmd file and preferences menu and didn't detect this.

any help or ideas would be appreciated
Thanks
Dave

Try having either the help open or firefox but never both at the same time. I wonder if Ubuntu64 has this problem ?

I would suggest using:

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini9.5/ [sidefx.com]

in your standard system browser for now. On Linux I setup the local help server(early days yet, they're still working on it), and it works great. Windows might be trickier, but as mentioned, they're working on standardizing this. One thing I did discover, though, is that there's a world of difference in performance and stabilization using your system browser(in my case FF3) over the shipped gecko internal help. I won't use it anymore, in fact.

Having to start up the builtin help first is a pain, of course, I would either use a local help server or the online ones posted at sesi, above.

Cheers,

J.C.

Unfortunately the search function doesn't work with the online docs.

Also doing a search with the local docs will only show the first 20 results of the search. It's kind of a bummer when you see there's 49 expression functions relating to “point” but can only see 20 of them…

Ooo yikes - thats not right that the search isn't working…maybe SESI is looking at it now?

Btw latest versions have lost those annoying warning messages that cropped up the first time you ran help…

Cheers,

J.C.

The help seems to be working in the latest build which is great !

Rob

I just checked the latest daily build, and the search function is still limited to the first 20 entries of each category.

Sorry this slipped through the cracks – you have to click “Show all N results” at the top of the pop-up box below the search field.