How can I add my own custom documentation to the MATLAB Help Browser in MATLAB 7.0 (R14)?

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I would like to add to the documentation, so that the documentation for my product shows up in the MATLAB Help Browser.

Accepted Answer

MathWorks Support Team
MathWorks Support Team on 8 May 2012
To add documentation for your own toolbox into the MATLAB help browser, use the following steps:
1. Create ‘info.xml’ which contains information about the documentation's name, icon and location.
2. Place this file on the MATLAB path.
3. Place an XML tag (“help_location”) in ‘info.xml’, which indicates the location of the help files (which may be a relative path from the location of ‘info.xml’).
The help files can follow the same format as they did for MATLAB 6.5 (R13).
The following maybe used as an example of an ‘info.xml’:
<productinfo
xmlns:xsi="<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="optional">
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl"href="optional"?>
<matlabrelease>14</matlabrelease>
<name>SpecSim (Example)</name>
<type>toolbox</type>
<icon>$toolbox/matlab/icons/book_mat.gif</icon>
<help_location>../examples</help_location>
</productinfo>
It will create an "Example Toolbox" node in the Help Browser's table of contents. In the subdirectory indicated by "help_location", the following files should be placed in order for the help to show up:
- helptoc.xml: contains the Table Of Contents (TOC), that will be displayed as a tree in the "Contents" tab
- helpindex.xml: contains the information that is displayed in the "Index" tab
- helpsearch.db: the database used for the search tab
You should also place all of the HTML-files containing the actual documentation in the directories that are referenced from the above 3 files.
Additional notes:
You can use "matlabrelease" tags, to indicate what version of MATLAB the documentation was created for:
<matlabrelease>14</matlabrelease>
These tags are not currently used, but may be used in later versions of MATLAB, as a cue for how to import the files.
It is not possible to specify your own files for use instead of the standard icons, as was available in MATLAB 6.5 (R13). This is a bug in MATLAB 7.0 (R14). There are no workarounds.
Finally, when using DOC to open documentation for a toolbox or a blockset, make sure that the name being used is properly capitalized, to match the directory name inside the $MATLABROOT/help/toolbox directory structure (where $MATLABROOT is the location where MATLAB is installed).

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