The PacletInfo.m documentation extension specifies how documentation is provided to the Mathematica help system.
The Workbench provides a multi-page editor to work with the PacletInfo.m. This provides tools for changing its contents, so that it is typically not necessary to change it directly.
The format for a documentation extension is {Documentation, arg1, arg2, ...}, as shown in the following.
A key feature of the documentation extension is specifying where the documentation is located in the application and how documentation URIs map to these.
A typical link to find documentation is written in the form paclet:linkbase/tutorial/Introduction, where linkbase is set to be the application name (this can be overridden by the LinkBase setting). This will find the document root/language/Tutorials/Introduction.nb, where root is set by the Root documentation setting, typically Documentation, and language is set by the Language setting. A sample installed application is shown in the following.
In this example the application root will be "", the documentation root will default to Documentation, the language will be English, and the link base will default to the name of the application NumericalAnalysis. Thus a URI paclet:NumericalAnalysis/tutorial/Introduction, will find the tutorial notebook Introduction.nb (if the Mathematica language is set to English). More information is available in the section on documentation links.
Note that this is not the layout of the application typically used in the Workbench, which will have the PacletInfo.m one level higher than the contents of the application.
Language
The Language setting is used to specify the language of documentation provided in the application. The documentation files must be placed in a folder of this name.
Root
The Root specifies the location of the documentation relative to the application root (which is set by the Root in the PacletInfo.m). If it is not set, the root gets a default value of Documentation.
If you want to develop your project with its documentation in a different location from that set by the Root, you can do this by setting the documentation location project property.
LinkBase
The LinkBase specifies the base of the links to documents in the application. If it is not set then the link base takes the name of the application, as set in the PacletInfo.m.
MainPage
The MainPage sets the main page of the application. This is the page that is opened by the documentation system when you enter the name of the application in the Mathematica search system. It is typical to set this to a main guide page or to an overview page. More information is found in the main page section.
Note that the MainPage setting is only supported in Mathematica 7 and higher.
Resources
Resources are an optional setting that describe the notebooks in the documentation. Their main use is to set up the main page for an application to run in Mathematica 6. A sample setting is shown below.
It does not need to list all the notebooks. The first guide page in the list will be used as the main page.