INFORMATION

This command displays various information about selected taxa. After a taxon or set of taxa have been selected in the usual way, a dialog is displayed. This allows the further selection of a single taxon (if more than one was originally specified), and the selection, by subject, of the information to be displayed for the currently selected taxon. The dialog remains open, allowing the selection and display of further information, until explicitly closed or a command which potentially changes the number of taxa remaining, is executed.

The kinds of information which may be displayed are as follows: (1) output of other commands such as DESCRIBE and DIAGNOSE; (2) images; (3) RTF files; (4) Intkey startup/initialization files (.ink); (5) any other external files with a registered type (i.e. for which a viewer is known to Windows, for example, HTML files, Word documents, Windows help files). The generation of output by means of other Intkey commands is specified by the Intkey command DEFINE INFORMATION. The other kinds of information are specified when the Intkey data files are generated by the author - see directives TAXON IMAGES and TAXON LINKS in the DELTA User"s Guide for details.

The "Web Search" button in the "Information" dialog can be used to search for the selected taxon using a nominated general-purpose search engine (e.g. Google) or taxonomic database (e.g. ITIS). The queries sent to the search engines are normally specified in a file websearch.ind, which is supplied with Intkey. If you want specify your own set of queries and avoid having them overwritten when new versions of Intkey are installed, put them in a file mywebsearch.ind; Intkey will use this instead of websearch.ind.

The SET INFOPATH command allows specification of the path to be searched for "information" files.

Syntax of command line: INFORMATION switches t1 t2 ...

where t1, t2 ... are taxon numbers, ranges or keywords.

The optional switches are as follows.