The Documentation Library Service allows you to read and search online HTML documents. It provides a library application that displays in your web browser. Within the library application, you can click on links to open documents for reading. You can also type words into the search form in the library application. The library service searches for the words and presents a search results page that contains links that lead to the documents that contain the target words.
To launch the library application, type the docsearch command or select the CDE help icon, click on the Front Panel Help icon, then click on the Documentation Library icon.
The documentation search service allows you to access only the documents on your documentation server that are registered with the library and that have been indexed. You cannot read or search the internet or all the documents on your computer. Indexing creates a specially compressed copy of a document or collection of documents. It is this index that is searched rather than the original documents. This technique provides significant performance benefits. When a phrase you are searching for is found in the index, the documentation search service presents a results page that contains links to select and open the document that contains the search phrase.
You can register your own company's HTML documents into the library so that all users can access and search the documents using the library application. Before your documents can be searched, you must create indexes of the documents. For more information on adding your own documents to the library, see Documents and Indexes.
With the exception of the library's search engine, the library's components are installed with the base operating system. To use the library service, it must be configured. You can configure a computer to be a documentation server and install documents on that computer; or you can configure a computer to be a client that gets all of its documents from a documentation server. If the computer is to be a documentation server, the search engine and documentation must also be manually installed.
It is highly recommended that the library service be fully configured since it is the library service for the operating system manuals and the Web-based System Manager documentation. Even if you do not need the operating system manuals, you should still configure the documentation library service since it is expected that other applications may use it as the library function for their own online documentation. For instructions on how to install and configure the documentation library service, see Installing and Configuring the Documentation Library Service and Installing AIX Documentation in AIX Version 4.3 Installation Guide.
The rest of this chapter contains information on changing the configuration of the library service after installation, adding or removing your own documents from the library, and problem determination.