Help scopes allow you to restrict the scope of a search and limit the topics which show in help contents. The active scope affects search and display differently depending on how you open help: in the embedded Help view it only filters search results, while in the standalone help browser it also filters the table of contents and keyword index. A scope can be defined to include only specific books or topics from the table of contents. If the documentation set has been configured to allow scoping by criteria it is possible also to define scopes which satisfy specific criteria such as "platform" = "linux".
From help contents the scope is changed by clicking on the link labelled "Scope" next to the search type in area. This opens a scope selection dialog, click "New ..." to create a new scope. The new scope dialog allows you to select which topics to show. If the documentation set does not support scoping by criteria, only the topic selection area is shown.
If the documentation has been set up to allow for scoping using criteria an additional set of checkboxes is displayed to the right of the topic selection area. You can define a scope using criteria such as "platform" = "linux" to include only topics identified by the documentation writer as applicable to that value.