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1. Preface

Structural Dynamics Toolbox

Product documentation and demos

• Release notes in section 1.7 describe new features, new products, and important bug fixes.
• Many of the sections in this manual provide self contained demos. Other demo scripts are grouped in the sdt/sdtdemos directory. For a direct access use demo toolbox structural.
• The documentation contains both a tutorial part (see section 1.2 for typical application areas), with detailed examples and theoretical reminders, and a reference listing all functions. You can access functions by category or alphabetically (see also element functions).
• You can find a primer for beginners at http://www.sdtools.com/help/primer.pdf.
• Symbols in equations do not show clearly in the help browser shipped with MATLAB. The PDF documentation is clearer in that respect.
• For contact information see section 1.1.

Information on the use of the SDT html documentation :

To fully use the MATLAB help browser capabilities, it is recommended to build the search index of the SDT html documentation by executing the following command :

builddocsearchdb(fullfile(fileparts(which('feplot')),'help'))

Then, to navigate in the documentation, several methods are possible.

• Open the MATLAB documentation with the command doc, click on Structural Dynamics Toolbox in the list of "Supplemental" Software and navigate with the table of content on the left.
• Search for html pages with keywords entered in the Search Help location and select the most appropriate result.
• Directly access a html page knowing its name with the function sdtweb. For instance, to display the documentation of the feplot function which is named feplot.html, execute the command sdtweb feplot.

Note a MATLAB bug makes links within a page inactive (jumps to head of the page rather than appropriate location). You can open in the webbrowser where the links work using sdtweb('feplot','webbrowser').