MATLAB help/documentation not displaying correctly

5
votes

I'm having a problem with the built-in help/documentation within MATLAB 2013a (issue also present in 2012b).

Upon opening the help files the pages appear with no formatting, only plain text. Search results do appear correctly though.

I have found only one instance of someone else with this issue, on MATLAB central here. However, there are no responses to the author's question. The issue I'm having is exactly the same as described there.

I have tried removing the preference folder and relaunching MATLAB but this doesn't help.

I'm using Windows 8.1 and MATLAB 2013a.

Any help or suggestions on how to fix this would be very much appreciated.

Edit: Thank you everyone for the feedback so far. I don't believe java to be the issue, I have the latest version installed (1.7.0_45) while MATLAB uses it's own version (1.6.0_17). Both of which co-exist on my machine.

Following horchler's thread led me to another semi-related bug report here. The following code is listed at the bottom of the workaround (the script attached to the workaround didn't fix anything unfortunately).

com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HtmlComponentFactory.setDefaultType('HTMLRENDERER');

This results in a degraded appearance of documentation pages and loss of some functionality but is still an improvement over the plain text and scrambled pages.

Hopefully from this new information we can work towards a solution!

3
matlab
One thought. What version of Java are you using? Type version -java in your command window. I'd make sure that is up-to-date. Also, what do you have set as your OS's default browser? - horchler
If you want to mess with the browser that Matlab uses, then you can look at this bug report workaround (for a probably unrelated OS X issue) for how you might change the default. - horchler
@horchler: I think Matlab brings its own Java, doesn't it? And the built-in browser is not Java-based, it uses xulrunner (Mozilla). At least on Linux, maybe on Windows these things are different - A. Donda
@A.Donda: I don't know about on Windows, but on OS X you can definitely update/change Java versions. And the doc browser in newer versions uses the system's default browser. However, I'm sure that Java is involved in chrome/UI around the rendered content. - horchler
@horchler, sure you can update the system java version, but the question is whether Matlab uses that or the java that comes packaged with Matlab. On Linux, it is the latter – for R2013a: Sun JRE 1.6.0, while my system java is IcedTea JRE 1.7.0. - A. Donda

3 Answers

5
votes

One solution is to go back to IE-10, or to use the patch on http://www.mathworks.com/support/bugreports/989850

Which basically replaces the localnav.js at <MATLAB>/help/includes/product/scripts

The link to download!

3
votes

This is an old post, but I had the same issue and have a fix (not downloading R2013b or java related). Just downgrade from IE 11 to 10: Go to System (or System & Security)->Windows Update->View Update History->Installed Updates -> Find IE11 and uninstall it. Your system should revert back to the prior installed version. This fixed the help issues.

2
votes

The problem is related to Internet Explorer 11, which MATLAB uses to render its help files. I was experiencing this problem in Windows 7 and rolling back to IE 10 fixed it right up. Unfortunately, that's not an option with Windows 8.