Manual

The documentation system for the Praat program.

You will get a manual window every time you choose anything from a Help menu or press a Help button.

## How to find what you are looking for

You can navigate the manual in several ways:

  • To go to the Intro, use the Home button.
  • To go to the information behind a link (a piece of blue text), just click on it.
  • To go forward and backward through a tutorial with numbered pages, use “1 >” and “< 1”.
  • To revisit previous pages, use the < and > buttons.
  • To browse alphabetically, use the horizontal scroll bar and the buttons named “< 1” and “1 >”, or the Search for page (list)... command in the “Go to” menu.
  • To find a page with a known title, use the Search for page... command.

The fastest way to find what you want is usually the Search button.

## Search

In the text field after the Search button, you can type strings, separated by spaces. When you press the Return (or Enter) key, or click the Search button, all manual pages are searched for the combination of strings that you typed. The titles of the 20 best matching pages are displayed as links.

Example: to know how to create a pitch contour from a sound, type

`sou pit
`

and press Return. The best matches should appear on top. These should include Sound: To Pitch (ac)... and Sound: To Pitch (cc)....

The search is case-insensitive. For instance, the search string “`script`” will give you all the pages that contain the words script, Script, description, PostScript, or SCRIPT, and so on.

Background. The search algorithm uses the following heuristics:

  • A match in the page title is better than one in the rest of the text.
  • Pages with many matches are better than those with few.

## Your own manual pages

To create your own manual pages, create ManPages text files.

### Links to this page

- File menu