F1 “Help” doesn’t “Help” to find the manual entry

[KarlAkimor]

Objective: When we are launching the manual help from Max program, manual help should be prioritized. Main topics should be easily searched without dealing with lots of noise.

The best case scenario for help in Max is the context sensitive help given in the Ribbon tools, that is excellent. The rest of menus in Max don’t have that privilege and only a short name appears.. The Ribbon suggests using F1 to get more help and I guess the same can be done in any item. But once used we are presented with a non context sensitive manual. Sending us directly to the manual page when hovering the item, appearing the hint and  F1 would be ideal solution. Anyway we have a search function and it is there where our problems start.

Examples:

The search for Swift Loop:

• The results only show forum, tutorials and unrelated entries. We notice the “refine by” menu and proceed to refine by “product documentation” No luck, all of them are tutorials that in my opinion should have his own section in the filters and not inside of “product documentation”. We want to search the manuals, nothing else.
•  We try to understand what is going on and realize Swift Loop is written in the menus without space. Even there are lots of references to Swift loop in tutorials and forums none of them will send me to the manual section. Ok, corrected and search again with filter active. The correct response is exactly the last one of the new search.

The search for baking normal maps

• This time we set “product documentation” filter. The correct response is the number 7, that sends us to the section of how to do it in the manual. But that is because I know where it is in the manuals. The rest of the items above look equality OK and will force the normal user to be exploring several wrong links. Again, lots of tutorial links, when we are looking for the manuals.

The search for cut tool

• With cut won’t even appear in the first page. With cut tool appears in the number 12. Again many other entries are apparently OK but they are not. Using the number 12 sends to the top of a long page and we need to search again. Using "Cut edit poly" won’t appear in the search lists.

Etc

Now we instead download the 3ds Max offline help, that is not connected to Max and needs to be downloaded manually, for the people that knows even exist. Is better? Perhaps, but won't solve fully our problems.

The search for Swift Loop:

• Third entry. Without space it is the only entry. Good

The search for baking normal maps

• It gets confused and none of the entries visible are useful

The search for cut tool

• No with Cut tool. If you use only Cut appears in the 5 entry, but you need to search again in a long page with lots of cut unrelated references.

For those looking for script documentation the entries are so mixed with others that the best option is simply to download the CHM help file that will restrict the help only to his content. The old help of long time ago works better than the modern online version.

[RGhost77]

1000% agree! I'm using .chm because online search in documentation never finds for me what I want.