R2024b: documentation installed locally - how can I bookmark help pages?

In R2024b, Matlab displays the documentation in the system web browser, without customization options in Windows.

Executing say

doc toc

opens the html page from the locally installed documentation, e.g.

http://127.0.0.1:58378/static/help/matlab/ref/toc.html?searchPort=58378

The port number (58378 above) seems to be randomly generated and is valid only as long as the current Matlab instance is running, so bookmarking the page for a future Matlab session is useless as the bookmark won't contain the new port number.

I suspect that there are no bookmark related problems with web documentation. Is that correct?

And is there a way to somehow bookmark local doc pages, preferably accessible as well when Matlab is not running?

[Andres]

Btw, when I open the file toc.html directly from [docroot]/matlab/ref/ in any of my browsers, I observe display problems with the page flickering and reloading infinitely.

Answer 1

[Andres]

You may, at least temporarily, reactivate the Help Browser, see How do I force MATLAB R2024b to open documentation pages in the Help Browser?

Another simple workaround could be to collect your bookmarks / favorites in a file like myBookmarks.m.

Taking up 裴国彪's question, find your (old) Help Favorites on Windows in shortcuts_2.xml in in AppData\Roaming, like

C:\Users\<WinUserName>\AppData\Roaming\MathWorks\MATLAB\R2023b

Each bookmark entry looks like this

<FAVORITE>
    <label>Add Help for Your Program</label>
    <icon>Help icon</icon>
    <callback>web(fullfile(docroot, 'matlab/matlab_prog/add-help-for-your-program.html'))</callback>
    <editable>true</editable>
</FAVORITE>

Copy the entries to myBookmarks.m and simply convert them by search&replace to sections like this

%% Add Help for Your Program
web(fullfile(docroot, 'matlab/matlab_prog/add-help-for-your-program.html'))

But hopefully in future TMW will deliver a solution to organize and call your bookmarks with locally installed documentation and an external web browser.

It would be desirable that Matlab allows more customization of calling said browser, e.g. to open the documentation in a specific browser profile and thus in a separate browser window, keeping it apart from your other browser tabs. For the time being, I use this tool for the purpose

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/176358-docu-separate-documentation-browser-tabs

%% Add Help for Your Program
docu('-w', fullfile(docroot, 'matlab/matlab_prog/add-help-for-your-program.html'))

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

Can you go to your router settings and assign your computer a static IP address? You should be able to.

[Walter Roberson]

the ip address is static as 127.0.0.1. the port number is variable

[Andres]

Correct, 127.0.0.1 is just localhost. One could however configure port fowarding on localhost connecting to the variable port of Matlab's local documentation service (58378 in my example above) once you know that number with some fixed listenport with netsh on Windows. Then you could save the local bookmarks using the fixed listenport, and they would work while the Matlab instance is running.

You would need to delete the port forwarding rule when closing Matlab. Port forwarding with netsh would require administrator rights. Cumbersome.

Answer 3

[裴国彪]

I've got the same problem.

• In R2024b, whenever a new matlab session is invoked, Edge browser bookmarks of matlab help pages added on previous matlab sessions cannot be open again, and I have to change port number over and over again mannually.
• The second problem is, I have marked a lot of documentation pages in matlab local help browser before R2024b, how can I transfer them to Edge browser bookmarks on R2024b?