Editing Symbolics Document Examiner (section)

==History==

[[Image:X-document.gif|thumb|300px|right|A screenshot of the included help documentation in Genera being looked at with Document Examiner.]]

The Symbolics manual was an 8,000-page document that was represented in a 10,000-node "hyperdocument" containing 23,000 [[hyperlink|links]] in all. The entire manual required 10 MB of [[hard disk drive|storage]] space - a significant amount in 1985, even on the [[Lisp machine]]s Symbolics sold. The Symbolics Document Examiner used a hierarchical structure, which differed from other experimental hypertext systems; it apparently was partially inspired by an even earlier hypertext system, the precursor to [[Texinfo]] which originated with [[Emacs]].<ref>"We saw no reason to have the underlying information structure be reflected in the user interface model unless that structure was a good model for interacting with information.   My experience in trying to help users with a tree-structured   information interface (the INFO subsystem in EMACS) led me to believe that a book-like interface would be more palatable for many people." pg 8 of Janet H. Walker's "[http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=317448&coll=portal&dl=ACM Document Examiner: Delivery Interface for Hypertext Documents]". 1987, ''Proceedings of the ACM conference on Hypertext''</ref>

Symbolics Document Examiner users could add bookmarks, which allowed returning to specific items easier; this method was later incorporated in graphical [[web browser]]s. The system also supported on-line substring searching. The biggest drawback to the Symbolics Document Examiner was that users could not make changes to any information or to a document's navigation.

The authoring environment for the Document Examiner was Symbolics Concordia. With Symbolics Concordia it was possible to edit all documentation.